Julian Barnes - Death and the Lemon Table

The Julian Barnes book Departures(s) is definitely not a novel even though it is called that. I am reading it slowly as there is so much information that for me is startling which at the same time I can understand.

Barnes mentions something he calls IAM which stands for Involuntary Autobiographical Memory. Some people have an extreme version of this and become stifled in their life to continue on.

While I do not remember (even if I try) what it was like when I was born I remember st stuff like being 7 or 8 and my mother was combing me. She said, “This hair over your forehead makes you look like Hitler.” I believe I asked him who he was but I do not remember her answer.

This IAM and an extreme version called HSAM or highly superior autobiographical memory, keeps appearing in my thoughts all the time. There is one in particular that I have written about before. I was six and I went into a cabinet to help myself with more candy corn that my mother had hidden there. When I opened the cabinet there was a mirror. I stared into it and thought, “This is me.” Since then it has become almost impossible for me to look into a mirror and not be back to when I was six. I think immediately of Borges who said that every first time is followed by that first time, over and over. And famously he asked, “Is this the last time this mirror will reflect my face?”

I had two good friends from my four years at the Catholic boarding school, St.Edward’s High School, in the late 50s. One of them, Howard Houston taught my older granddaughter when she was 8 to fish. The other friend, Lee Lytton my wife and two granddaughters met in his birthplace in Sarita, Texas. He was most gracious and invited us to a nice restaurant by a river.

Why are these two friends in my thoughts? These thoughts are definitely not voluntary.

I will have to keep on with the Barnes book to see if he has more revelations on the subject.

When I look at a book in a bookstore I like to read the first paragraph (and sometimes the last). I wrote about that here. In Departure(s) Barnes has this first paragraph – The other day I discovered and alarming possibility. No, worse: an alarming fact.

First Paragraphs and Autobiographical Novels 

But even more startling is that on the previous page he has the title for the first chapter – The Great I Am.

I believe that this book is the best book to read if you are reaching that age when oblivion is statistically an immediate possibility.

The photograph of Rosemary illustrating this blog I took in 1969 a year after we had been married in Mexico City. It is in front of my bed on the opposite wall where she stares at me and I stare back. I was there in 1969 with my camera in hand. I cannot stop thinking that. It is my AIM working and like Borges would have said, I look at her portrait which I just took.