...the very old men [...] believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

Memory believes before knowing remembers.[Light in August]

It is a happy faculty of the mind to slough that which conscience refuses to assimilate.