Stories in An Almost Classical Mode
“There are unmodulated, gray sounds and unidentifiable words—I mean it is a very strange mumble, with the words indistinguishable from each other and from the gray, electrical hush of the mind, remembering, running.
Sometimes, even with great effort, the words can’t be made clear, although I seem to know what the figure—gray-lit, somewhat obscure—is talking about; and if I wash out the figure, if I make the memory purely auditory, I often hear words, phrases, fragments of a sentence (rarely a wh...ole sentence), and what I hear is not the voice of the person who once spoke those words; I mean the music is missing, the actual sound, the actual pitch and key, the inflections, the riding-on-the-breath thing (by which you recognize a voice on the telephone): none of that is there at all. But suddenly a sentence will appear in my head; and some identifier, some cataloguer will say, My mother said that.… Ha-ha, I think amiably; yes, she did; that’s her voice—but it isn’t her voice: it’s only her words—and part of what she meant.MoreLess
Sometimes, even with great effort, the words can’t be made clear, although I seem to know what the figure—gray-lit, somewhat obscure—is talking about; and if I wash out the figure, if I make the memory purely auditory, I often hear words, phrases, fragments of a sentence (rarely a wh...ole sentence), and what I hear is not the voice of the person who once spoke those words; I mean the music is missing, the actual sound, the actual pitch and key, the inflections, the riding-on-the-breath thing (by which you recognize a voice on the telephone): none of that is there at all. But suddenly a sentence will appear in my head; and some identifier, some cataloguer will say, My mother said that.… Ha-ha, I think amiably; yes, she did; that’s her voice—but it isn’t her voice: it’s only her words—and part of what she meant.MoreLess
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