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265 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
A person who claims to remember having read one or another book is seldom able to quote from memory even one sentence from the text. What the person probably remembers is part of the experience of having read the book: part of what happened in his or her mind during the hours while the book was being read. I can still remember, nearly sixty years later, some of what I read as a child, which is to say that I can still call to mind some of the images that occurred to me while I read as a child. As well, I claim that I can still feel something of what I felt while those images were in the foreground of my mind.
In short, I may have written those works only so that I could write at last about the images that had persisted for fifty years and more in the background of my mind no matter whom I fell in love with or who became my wife or what children were born to us or what befell us during the onrush of events that might be called my seeming life.
Another answer suggests itself. My published books may have been written not in order to remove images from my mind but to arrange them more appropriately and to give certain images their rightful prominence. I may have written during the past thirty years and more not one after another separate book but one after another chapter of the one book, the final chapter of which I am trying to write at present…
In the image that I see of my aunt’s face I can find no detail to explain the sternness and disapproval that seems to emanate from the image. However, I have for long recognised that time has no existence in the image-world. I am therefore able to suppose that my image-aunt, during her wanderings among my image-landscapes, has come upon certain image-evidence from the years during the 1950s when I masturbated often. That image-evidence would have included image-details of her image-nephew syping on his image-cousins, her image-daughters, during certain image-picnics on image-beaches during the early image-1950s, whenever one or another of the image-cousins leaned so far forward in order to reach for an image-tomato-sandwich or an image-patty-cake that the upper parts of her image-breasts were exposed or whenever she reached down to pick up some image-object from the image-sand and so caused the lower part of her image-bathing-costume to be stretched upwards, thereby exposing two image-rolls of image-flesh at the base of her image-buttocks. I am even able to suppose that my image-aunt may have come upon one or another image of a woman with an upswept image-hairstyle and an expression on her image-face of image-tolerance or even image-sympathy for the image-nephew and his image-spying, although I have never been able to suppose that my image-aunt would not have been sternly disapproving of such an image-image.