An American Childhood

But like anyone, I could recall and almost see fleet torn fragments of a scene: a raincoat's sleeve wrinkling, a blond head bending, red-lighted rain falling on asphalt, a pesteringly interesting pattern on a cordovan shoe, which rises and floats above that face I want to see. I perceived these sights as scraps that floated like blowing tissue across some hollow interior space, some space at the arching roof of the ribcage, perhaps. I swerved to study them before they slid away.

I hoped that sentences would ail the blowing scraps down. I hoped that sentences would store scenes like rolls of film, rolls of films I could simply reel off and watch. But of course, the sentences did not work that way. The sentences suggested scenes to the imagination, which were no sooner repeated than envisioned, and envisioned just as poorly and just as vividly as actual memories.

An American Childhood, Annie Dillard

1987