Running with the Pack by Mark Rowlands Read Free Book Online Page B

understand that whatever happens today, however far I get, I should be here. I am doing what I should be doing. The experience of freedom I find on the longrun is, in fact, the experience of a kind of value that I once knew but came to forget. Running is the embodied apprehension of this value. The first step is taken. The long run begins. I hope.

2
    The Stone Mountain
    1976
    I have a dream of myself as an old man. I’m in a house, and I have the feeling that I am packing up to sell. Through the years, the house has been progressively decorated in new styles, but at least one room has always been left as a souvenir of the previous vogue. One room is 1970s chunky teak and padded beige; another is 1980s pine and sleek tubular steel. The 1990s room bears the indelible stamp of IKEA. It seems to me so improbable that all these things should belong in the same house. Rooting through the long-neglected attic I come across a collection of photographs that I cannot remember taking. The photographs depict people and places that seem vaguely familiar, but no more than that. I suspect the photographs are mine. In fact, I am pretty sure they are. I live in this house alone. Whose photographs would they be if not mine? But when I turn these photographs over, there is nothing written there that tells me to whom they belong. On the question of ownership, it seems that reasonable inference is the best I can do.
    It is life itself I can’t quite get: life in its breadth and depth. The longer I live, the more incongruous it all seems: the more trouble I have finding a place for everything — the more unlikely it seems that all these things should go together. Life progressively transforms itself from the natural and obvious to the gerrymandered and improbable. These memories I have, the ones that so enthusiastically thrust themselves upon me — they are mine. I have no doubt of that. It’s my mind, and I’m the only one here: whose memories would they be if not mine? Possession is, after all, nine-tenths of the law. I’m not insane. I do not believe these memories were implanted in me by aliens. But there is nothing brightly embossed on them that reads ‘Property of Mark Rowlands’. What strikes me as obvious is not that they are my memories, but that they couldn’t be the memories of anyone else. Sometimes, this is the best I can do.
    Remembering is effortless in its early days. There is so much room for each new memory, and no design or fashion exigencies to satisfy. But when the house of memory starts to become cluttered, then more and more remembering becomes an act of will, one that is sometimes difficult to execute with any real satisfaction. More and more the coherence — the sense — of a life is not something that is simply given but something that has to be achieved through one or another ad hoc manoeuvre. Memories, I suspect, disappear not because we can’t make them any more — and not even because we no longer have room for them. They just become too incongruous, too unlikely. Perhaps, in the end, it will be my utter implausibility that does for me. I shall have become too improbable to be here any more — a hypothesis that can no longer be believed.
    And so, from time to time but more and more, my attemptsto remember are characterized by a strange sense of amazement. That these memories should all belong to a single life is a faintly surreal discovery. It strikes me as so extraordinarily unlikely — a fortuitous bonus — that they should all go together, bundled up in a single winding pathway through space and time. Was it really me that saw those things; that did those things? Even worse: I know enough about memory to know that the photograph model is deeply flawed. Memories are not replicas of past events. They are renderings: part replica, part fabrication. A memory is an artifice stitched together by me. I am not just the cameraman, but the editor, and often