Just Because: 'The Memoirs of a Survivor'

Doris Lessing, 1962

Author Doris Lessing died on Nov. 17 (story, videos): http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-24979129

   Lessing was born in Iran (then called Persia) in 1919. She is perhaps best known for her work The Golden Notebook and not so much for another book, The Memoirs of a Survivor, which she once called "an attempt at an autobiography."

Part One

We all remember that time. It was no different for me than for others. Yet we do tell each other over and over again the particularities of the events we shared, and the repetition, the listening, is as if we are saying: 'It was like that for you, too? Then that confirms it, yes, it was so, it must have been, I wasn't imagining things.' We match or dispute like people who have seen remarkable creatures on a journey: 'Did you see that big blue fish? Oh, the one you saw was yellow?' But the sea we travelled over was the same, the protracted period of unease and tension before the end was the same for everybody, everywhere; in the smaller units of our cities—streets, a cluster of tall blocks of flats, a hotel, as in cities, nations, a continent ... yes, I agree that this is pretty highflown imagery considering the nature of the events in question: bizarre fish, oceans, and so forth. But perhaps it wouldn't be out of place here to comment on the way we—everyone—will look back over a period in life, over a
sequence of events, and find much more there than they did at the time. This is true even of events as dispiriting as the litter left on a common after a public holiday. People will compare notes, as if wishing or hoping for confirmation of something the events themselves had not licensed—far from it, something they had seemed to exclude altogether. Happiness? That's a word I have taken up from time to time in my life, looked at—but I never did find that it held its shape. A meaning, then; a purpose? At any rate, the past, looked back on in this frame of mind, seems steeped in a substance that had seemed foreign to it, was extraneous to the experiencing of it. Is it possible that this is the stuff of real memory? Nostalgia, no; I'm not talking of that, the craving, the regret—not that poisoned itch. Nor is it a question of the importance each one of us tries to add to our not very significant pasts: 'I was there, you know. I saw that.'
   But it is because of this propensity of ours that perhaps I may be permitted the fancy metaphors. I did see fish in that sea, as if whales and dolphins had chosen to show themselves coloured scarlet and green, but did not understand at the time what it was I was seeing, and certainly did not know how much my own personal experience was common, was shared: this is what, looking back, we acknowledge first—our similarities, not our differences.
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