Recall

As long as the memory itself lives and remains flexible, as long as it is not petrified, there is not a single chance at trying to bring to a halt this flood of recalls and capture images frozen in time. Faces of the past — past youths, lived and forgotten lives — never freeze forever. Images of the past, images of the whole generations of a family — they get farther away from the present, they are constantly revived in our multiple recollections — and they change relentlessly. Some of the features are erased; some of them come back to surface. Again and again we address our own and other’s memory and we have to finish writing family stories and to touch-up portraits of our own relatives. Even the experience of analyzing recollections acquired during one’s lifetime does not help achieve neither the absolute clarity of familial and personal memory, nor, at the same time, the impenetrable obscurity of oblivion. We are always somewhere in between, halfway to the truth.