I see three soldiers on a flat just below a copse, shells raining down, a brick building 100 yards away with hospital beds and nurses and doctors. There's a cave, a boat, Catherine and Frederic, and a bleeding wound. Reading A Farewell to Arms for the second time, ten years later, the memories come back to me. My sense for the landscape of the front, the timing of events and the flow of the book, in memory, is completely off. But the essence of the book is still there. Nothing has been the least bit surprising.
I'm prone to attribute my faulty memories, in part, to my inferior reading ability when I first read the book. When before I let the book take me hospital to hospital, with no attention to the relative locations (or perhaps confusion), now when I read I insist on making a mental map, tracking all the characters. When I say it like that it sounds like the reading experience is worse; it is not. But there's also the other World War I books and poems that I've read, and these writings have certainly appropriated the images of Frederic in the hospital. Good use but destructive. And these images have been a lovely little world that I'm taken back to occasionally. Perhaps I didn't want to spoil the memories. For it was my favorite book back then, and I'm only just rereading it; I do not know why. It called to me from the shelf in the other room and I went to grab it and started reading.
July 24th, 2019. Boston, Ma.