Member-only story
Look at the Landscape Through Your Legs: How Our Imagination Shapes Our View of the World
In her posthumously published memoir Family of Earth: A Southern Mountain Childhood, Wilma Dykeman asks us to think about the ways that we process reality and the stories we hear and share. Dykeman wrote the manuscript in her twenties in the early 1940s. Early on, she details learning to walk and learning to speak, moments that most people do not remember at all. I know, for myself, that I have no recollection of these milestones, yet I still have images in my head of them. Dykeman proclaims that each of these acts served as the beginnings of her life: “Now, indeed, I had begun life. By one act, I had established my independence and solitary nature; by the other I had woven an invisible thread of contact and sociability between myself and other people.” These moments are monumental in everyone’s life, but we don’t remember the “reality” of these milestones.
Even though we do not recall the moments when we learned to do certain things, we retain, on some level, and image of the event, of the moment. It resides in our minds, not as a continuous film moving from frame to frame in rapid succession but as a series of still images that feel more akin to snapshots. In some ways, we feel a disconnect from the memory. I have memoires of myself as a toddler, doing different things. However, these…
