If memory were composed only of our ability to remember the past, we might never evolve as individuals. But memory and remembering are also the processes by which we interpret the events of our lives. When I remember, for example, reading Absalom! Absalom! on the train between Brussels and Bruges, my distrust of Quentin Compson, the familiarity of his words in my mouth, depended, in large part, on where I’d grown up and on my knowledge of the man sitting next to me on the train. This reading produced memories I now draw to the surface—the bitterness of the morning’s coffee, the smell lingering in the cabin long after the cup was empty, the book’s oily pages, the compact font—and this remembering produces new interpretations of the original experience.

Interacting with the present is no different. My perceptions of the present, which I interpret in unique and individual ways, are created and made meaningful as memories by the context of my experience. Memory, like reading, is thus an inherently creative act: the characters, their voices and images, are supplied by the external world, but it is the individual imagination that holds them together in the mind, that creates them, keeps creating them, gives them lasting form. We depend on these narratives to understand our lives. It never strikes us odd that they are always changing.