The Address Book: Our Place in the Scheme of Things

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The Address Book

Our Place in the Scheme of Things

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We become more or less what we have always been, which might be why we take so little notice of the ways in which we have changed, which in turn might be why, in so many of the chambers of the museum of memory, we find some empty scaffolding, a blank wall, a pail and broom, and a laconic notice that describes the picture that must once have hung there. The unhappy, the abused, the insecure and the fearful are tormented by their memories, and want to forget. Happy people are secure, and securely unaware of their happiness, serenely enjoying each moment, without overtly wishing to remember. The changes, the disjunctions, the Alice in Wonderland moments when we tumble into a new environment, stay with us, but the intimate, physical, moment-by-moment experience of humdrum contentment blurs immediately and fades swiftly. Even so, some memories survive, with a sensual intensity that can be evoked unexpectedly by a smell, a sound, a set of words, a name, a snatch of song, or even a moment in the sun or the rain.

Such recall can happen on some hot, perfect day in the Mediterranean, one of those days when the Sun’s rays burn through the fabric of a cotton shirt and begin to caress the shoulder muscles with the force of a physiotherapist’s thumbs; because on a summer day in Auckland the Sun could hammer the city hard enough to set up a heat-shimmer on the concrete lanes at the centre of the road, and melt the tar strip on either side. It can happen halfway up Mount Fuji in Japan, at a picnic spot marked by lumps of scoria: fist-sized lumps of rapidly ejected volcanic rock so hot and so gas-filled that when it cooled and fractured it was as full of holes – the technical term is vacuoles – as a sponge, but jagged and unforgiving to the touch; because Auckland, of which Devonport was fifty years ago a poor suburb, was built on dozens of extinct or perhaps just dormant volcanoes, all of them low, conical and piled high with scoriaceous rock. It can happen in summer rain: Auckland was a rainy place – it still is – with twice the precipitation of London, and an enduring memory is of a childhood barefoot in the rain: a warm rain, all too often kept off by an uncomfortably sticky waterproof. It can happen when I stand under a pepper tree in Claremont, California – the Peruvian pepper, Schinus molle, a pungent but not particularly common ornamental species that leaves a film of resin on the fingers: my brother and two sisters and I grew up watching the world go by from the gnarled branches of an old pepper tree in the front garden.

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