While reading a description of the countryside, it occurs to me that it is utterly impossible to picture a scene entirely new. I keep harking back to rural scenes from memory and putting them in place of the description. Perhaps this is true of everything we read – no characters but those who spark memories of real people (and parts of real people in new combinations) that we once knew or met, or glimpsed for a moment. No houses but those we have visited, remembered, disassembled, reconstructed with the structures of memory. No happy experience, or sad, that was but an echo.
The attraction, then, of reading and writing must be the infinite multiplicity of possibilities. The memories fragmented and rebuilt into meaningful narrative, the endless play of phenomena in all its guises, not unlike the twenty-six letters themselves (and a space), arranged and rearranged in patterns to replicate the song of the songbird, the shot of an arrow, the curve of the moon.