You know how you can remember exactly when and where you read certain books? A great novel, a truly great one, not only captures a particular fictional experience, it alters and intensifies the way you experience your own life while you’re reading it. And it preserves it, like a time capsule.
Lily King, ‘Heart the Lover’.
When I came across this quote some months back, it got me thinking about the books that have become my personal time capsules throughout the years, freezing certain particularly vivid memories between their pages.
The Book: God’s Smuggler by Brother Andrew.
The Memory: Me at 14, reading about the protagonist’s bond with a monkey he rescued while serving in the Dutch army in Indonesia, in the wee hours of the morning in my maternal grandparents’ home in Ipoh during the school holidays.
“Well you see, the natives know that a monkey will never let go of something he wants even if it means losing his freedom. So here’s what they do. They take a coconut and make a hole in one end just big enough for a monkey’s paw to slip through. Then they drop a pebble into the hole and wait in the bushes with a net.
Sooner or later a curious old fellow will come along. He’ll pick up that coconut shell and rattle it. He’ll peer inside. And then at last he’ll slip his paw into the hole and feel around until he gets bold of that pebble. But when he tries to bring it out, he finds that he cannot get the paw through the hole without letting go. And Andy, that monkey will never let go of what he thinks is a prize. It’s the easiest thing in the world to catch a fellow who acts like that.”
The Book: A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis.
The Memory: Me at 21, grieving over the loss of my dog whom I’ve had since I was 4, while the rest of the world mourned over Princess Diana’s passing. It was my first experience with real grief and the opening lines of Lewis hit right home.
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.“
The Book: Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters.
The Memory: Me at 28, standing among the shelves at a Borders bookstore, continuing my reading of the book which I had left at home with the copy pulled from the shelves, because I couldn’t wait to get back to it. The chilly air-conditioning in the bookstore helped “freeze” this particular passage into my memory.
“It was a bitterly cold and beautiful night perfectly quiet, once we had left the clamour of the party behind us, and still. The roads were foggy, and thick with ice: every so often I felt the wheels of our carriage slide a little, and caught the sound of the horse’s slithering, uncertain step, and the driver’s gentle curses. Beside us the pavements glittered with frost, and each street-lamp glowed, in the fog. from the centre of its own yellow nimbus. For long stretches, ours was the only vehicle on the streets at all; the horse, the driver, Kitty and I might have been the only wakeful creatures in a city of stone and ice and slumber.
The Thames was freezing over. […] How cold it must be!’ I said softly. ‘Imagine if the whole river froze over, if it was frozen right down from here to Richmond. Would you walk across?
I made no answer, only stared at where the curdled water swirled, thick and unwilling, about the columns of the bridge beneath our feet. But when she shivered again I moved a step closer to her, and felt her lean against me in response. It was icy cold upon the bridge: we should have moved back from the parapet into the shelter of the carriage. But we were loath to leave the sight of the frozen river – loath too, perhaps, to leave the warmth of one another’s bodies, now that we had found it.“
The Book: Like by Ali Smith.
The Memory: Me at 31, making physical trips to the hospital with my mum to visit my dad who had been admitted for observation and some medical tests after an unexplained episode of nosebleed. Mentally, I was travelling with the protagonist in Ali Smith’s debut novel, making my way through the ruins in Pompeii. Never did I imagine that in less than three weeks, I would be making my way through the ruins in the landscape of my own reality, after the sudden passing of my dad from a massive heart attack.
“I could take Kate to the museum, she thinks. In that big garden there they have those fruit trees. We could pick some oranges, if nobody is watching.
Or, if they have time, they could go back to Pompeii again for the afternoon. Think of that. Nothing but the empty shells of you left, nothing but the air where you were. The shape you made last, by chance, the shape you’ll end up keeping. When the excavators poured plaster into the air pockets they kept finding in the lava, the plaster hardened and made doorknobs, doors, furniture, wooden embellishments, and people. The wood and the bodies had decomposed and left their shapes behind them, spaces in air. In rooms round the Gladiators’ Court they found eighteen bodies, seventeen of them big men, and one elderly woman covered in jewels. Seventeen gladiators couldn’t save her.“
The Book: Levels of Life by Julian Barnes.
The Memory: Me at 43, having checked into my hospital room and getting prepped for my surgery that was scheduled for the following morning. I had the room to myself and the company of a grieving Barnes, and it was oddly comforting.
“It was thirty seven days from diagnosis to death. I tried never to look away, always to face it: and a kind of crazy lucidity resulted. Most evenings, as I left the hospital, I would find myself staring resentfully at people on buses merely going home at the end of their day. How could they sit there so idly and unknowingly, their indifferent profiles on display, when the world was about to be changed?“
And what might your ‘time capsules’ be, if I may ask?
