just something i liked . . . .

this is a passage tied a lot of things together in a way that i could relate to. it's the second paragraph on page 114.

"Under the quilt at night, I could dream even before I went to sleep. Yet even there I could never see Mrs. Solovey's face clearly, but still ran round and round the block looking for her after i had passed her kitchen window. It was an old trick, the surest way of getting to sleep: I put the quilt high over my head and lay there burrowing as deep into the darkness as I could get, thinking of her through the long black hair the women on the counter wore. Then i would make up dreams before going to sleep: a face behind the lattice of a summer house, half-hidden in thick green leaves; the hard dots sticking out of the black wallpaper below; the day my mother was ill and our cousin had taken me to school. The moment i felt myself drifting into sleep, my right knee jerked as if i had just caught myself from tripping over somtheing in the gutter."

while i think this passage is beautifully worded, i was also drawn to it's illustration of what is between real and what is made up. while kazin is imagining a fictional narrative within his dozing mind, they seem to slowly melt into memories which were real. i also really liked the idea of the darkness within the quilt being the form, which physically enabled him to create these non-physical memories/dreams. it is much like the autobiography itself. physically, the book holds the content - the written word of the authors past. but the intangible memories; the images and emotions evoked, always seem to be floating somewhere above the book itself.

this transition from wake to sleep reminded me of the boundary for authors of autobiographies, and how they have to go about recreating their memories. i think it will always be hard to draw the line between truth and lie, when your dealing with memory. since everyone's perceptions are always completley subjective, and relative to their ever-changing emotions, personality, morals & values, etc., there can never be a one, black and white truth. the truth is in vibrant colors! and no one's red is the same as the guy next to him.