Memories

I love reading memoirs and autobiographies and I’m always amused and a bit sceptical whenever I come across a passage that might go something like:

“I was six months old. I was sitting in my high-chair. Mother had prepared porridge for my breakfast. But I didn’t want to eat it. Mother became cranky. I learned that day that life is a continual battle of wills between Self and Other”

I think, is this bullshit, artistic license, or does this guy really remember what he had for breakfast when he was six months old, the events surrounding said breakfast, and the philosophical implications of it all. I can’t remember what I had for breakfast last week. (It was probably, nothing or the Breakfast of Champions: coffee and cigarettes.)

I am intrigued by people’s earliest memories. Jack Kerouac claimed that he could remember being born. A woman I used to work with once told me had absolutely no memories of her childhood. One image that I remember from an online discussion of ‘earliest childhood memories’ was that of a woman who remembered being 18 months old; finding herself standing on a fire-ant nest in her backyard, and her father lifting her up and rescuing her.

My earliest memory: I am three years old. I’m in Italy. It’s winter. Snow. I’m wandering about a farm. I come to a pig pen. The pigs are a lot bigger and meaner looking than the pigs I had seen in picture books. They are huge. They seem as big as hippos. I am fascinated and frightened,