Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.

Infancy is irretrievable. Its memories live underground. To what extent they return by stealth or are triggered by various catalysts remains an ongoing question.

What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible.

My memory of the school building itself, its rooms and lockers, blackboards, and hallways, bring on a heavy, oppressive feeling. Whether I was more unhappy in school than any of my friends I don't know. I never would have said I didn't like school, and there are moments I distinctly remember enjoying, but these truths don't alter my memory of that place.

It is true that I suffered in a difficult and stupid love affair and that I worked at one bad job after another to try to keep myself going. Nevertheless, I remember that time as extraordinary, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I don't even wish now that I had more money. And had I been asked if I was suffering at the time, I would have said a defiant no.

It can only be that places left behind often become emotionally simplified - that they sound a single note of pain or pleasure, which means that they are never what they were.

In this early memory he looks different from the way I would remember him later.

Do you know that I can't remember her face? Try as I may, it will not be conjured. I can tell you what she looked like; I can recite a description of her features, part by part, but I cannot evoke the whole face.''Don't you have a photograph?''Photographs!' He spat out the word. 'I'm talking about true recollection - seeing the face.