Free Travels with Epicurus by Daniel Klein Page A

history is a way we find meaning in our lives.
    ON CHERRY-PICKING MEMORIES
    Charles Dickens begins his masterwork
David Copperfield
, “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”
    That line always brings a smile to my face. After all, if I am not the hero of my own life, who the hell else could it be? But I suspect that old Dickens was setting up a proto-existentialist gag here: that “anybody else” could be the personification of the outside powers that determined the events in Copperfield’s life, say, fate. To put it another way, maybe David Copperfield did not
choose
his life; he just let it happen to him. The existentialists would not approve. Whether or not Copperfield turns out to be the
subjective
hero of his life is the fundamental question that the first-person narrator apparently hopes to answer by recounting his adventures in “these pages.” This pursuit begins by asking what events appear to be meaningful and to follow meaningfully from other events.
    Even when we are only composing memoirs for ourselves alone, we still cherry-pick our memories, choosing those that give some semblance of a neat narrative line to our personal histories, some sense of cause and effect, even of personal growth. And, then, of course there is that other nasty problem, which Mark Twain eloquently noted: “When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not; but I am getting old, and soon I shall remember only the latter.” It seems, after all, that we’ll need to take a look at that pesky philosophical question, “How do we know what is real and true?” although gently qualified by the addendum, “Does it really make much difference in this case?”
    When we reminisce for our own private gratification, we usually do not seek out a fact-checker. What we are interested in is recalling an
experience
: how it felt to us, what it meant to us then, and what it means to us now. For example, whether I actually did have a particular conversation about wild strawberries with Professor Erikson back in college, or I am confounding it with a conversation I had with a classmate, or possibly only even had inside my head after attending an Erikson lecture, would not seem to make a determinate difference in putting together a meaningful story of my life. What
may
matter, and perhaps a great deal, is that the subject of this conversation—whether or not it actually occurred—was something that had a memorable impact on me, perhaps on the development of a lifetime interest, possibly even on my subsequent worldview. Indeed the fact that I have this memory and attach significance to it matters more than its absolute, objective truth.
    No, I am not wandering off into a la-la land where I claim a memory is true simply because I
think
it is true. If I vividly recall my first moon walk as an astronaut, despite having it on good authority that I was never an astronaut and never came closer to the moon than the peak of Mount Washington, I will have to say that I have waited too long to meditate on the story of my life and have crossed the border into
old
old age where I simply cannot think straight. Somewhere between my possibly misremembered conversation with Professor Erikson and a moon walk fantasy-memory, I will need to draw a line. Not easy.
    A series of lectures on the art of memoir held at the New York Public Library was called Inventing the Truth. Cute, but they were also on to something important with that title: when we try to put together our life story, we seek out patterns and themes, and that, in turn, determines which memories make the cut. And, of course, the other way around too: we sift through our memories for themes and then search for memories that validate them.
    In our way, we are attempting to pull off the same artful trick that Dickens did: by picking and