The Memory Palace by Mira Bartók Read Free Book Online

something I don’t do well anymore. I was afraid I would miss something, something so small you can’t see or sense if you are putting words to the page—the subtle twitch of a finger, a swift sideways glance, a snippet of song down the hall.
    And yet, what does it matter anyway? Memory, if it is anything at all, is unreliable. Even birds, with their minute brains, have better memories than we do. Nuthatches and black-capped chickadees remember precisely where they stored food in the wild. Honeybees have “flower memory” and remember exactly where they already have been to pollinate a flower. They can even recall the colors and scents of their food sources, and the times of day when their food is at its best. We humans are different—our brains are built not to fix memories in stone but rather to transform them. Our recollections change in their retelling.
    Still, I wondered if I should try to take notes. Without some kind of written record, would I remember these quiet, fleeting days? Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel says we are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember. Who am I, then, if my memory is impaired? And how will I remember my mother after she is gone?
    Some of my old memories feel trapped in amber in my brain, lucid and burning, while others are like the wing beat of a hummingbird, an intangible, ephemeral blur. But neuroscientists say that is how memory works—it is complex and mercurial, a subterranean world that changes each time we drag something up from below. Every sensation, thought, or event we recall physically changes the neuroconnections in our brain. And for someone who suffers from brain trauma, synapses get crossed, forcing their dendritic branches to wander aimlessly down the wrong road.
    And yet, I can still walk into a museum and name almost everything on the wall. I can recall pictures I drew, even ones I made as a child. I remember artifacts from museums, fossils, masks, and bones. The part of my brain that stores art and all the things I loved to look at and draw is for the most part intact. Perhaps the visual part of my brain can help retrieve the events thatare lost. If neuroscientific research suggests that the core meaning of a memory remains, even if its details have been lost or distorted, then if I find the right pictures, the pictures could lead me to the core.
    In my mother’s room, while she slept and Natalia wrote, I took out one of my mother’s diaries, one from 1992. That year I had gone to Israel and brought back a bag of stones. One contained an ammonite, a fossilized nautilus shell. When I got home I poured water on it to see what it might have looked like centuries ago in the sea. I wondered how long it had been hidden in the earth, a rock shifting against rocks, rising up over time from primordial sediment. Isn’t that how memory works too? We look at something—a picture, a stone, a bird—and a memory surfaces, then that memory carries us to another, and another. Memory isn’t just mutable, it is associative. Thomas Aquinas once said, “One arrives at the color white through milk, to air from the color white, to dampness from air and on to Autumn.” How, then, would I arrive back at my own past?
    “Myra?” my mother said, her eyes half shut. “Are you still here?”
    I hid her journal inside the book in my lap. “I’m still here.”
    “Where’s your sister?”
    “She’s here too. She just stepped out for a second but she’ll be right back.”
    “You won’t run away?”
    “No,” I said. “I won’t run away.”
    “Myra?”
    “Yes?”
    “Would you do something for your old lady?”
    “Anything.”
    “Brush your hair. It’s really a mess.”
    “I’ll do it right now.”
    “Good. Because a girl has to put her best foot forward whenever she can.”
    We left the hospital late that night. Most of the day had been quiet, just the sound of our mother’s slow breathing and the radio purring in the background. My