The Things They Carried

I am reading Tim O'brien's "The Things They Carried" and just learned that he was 43 years old when he began writing this collection of stories of his time as an infantryman in Vietnam.  The strange thing is, it was three years ago that I took up the pen to begin writing about the things I remembered and I am 46.  I'm thinking there must be some kind of developmental switch that gets thrown in your brain soon after turning 40.  He perfectly describes my experience with this metaphor:

"But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.  You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present.  The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up in your head, where it goes in circles for awhile, then pretty soon the imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets.  As a writer, all you can do is pick up a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you."

Sometimes these streets are well demarcated and pull me into the flow easily.  Sometimes it is a narrow back way that is hard to follow but compelling to the point I feel I have to try and work it out.

I've noticed that the flow is most full and true when I allow myself to be vulnerable, to look on my younger self with some degree of pity and compassion.  So much of the pain and loneliness of growing up was covered over by denial which was what kept me from writing for so long.  All of those years I wanted to write, but was afraid to concretize my experiences in words.  It's like I wanted the water to flow under the bridge.  I fought the urge to bottle it, afraid of what I might find.

Like O'brien, I have to carry out these ideas mostly in a fiction-nonfiction hybrid because memory is patchy and there are gaps to fill if I want to capture the essence of what I remember.  Unlike O'brien, this is not a full time gig and I only have rare moments to catch-as-catch-can.  But I think it is important to make the effort.  It was Socrates who said, "the unexamined life is not worth living" or at least I think he said that.  My memory is not always all that good.


***