"Brooding on the past," he said, regarding Spring. "Will that bring it back?"

"Brooding on the past," he said, regarding Spring.  "Will that bring it back?"
"Only order it."
She knew that, reasonable as they might seem, people like this who live on the street are differently composed from people who live in houses.  They have a reason of being where they are, expressed in a peculiar apprehension of things, a loss of engagement with the ordinary world and how it goes on, often unwilled.  She knew she must not press questions on him, pursue a subject, for like the paths in this place that would only lead her away.  Yet she wanted very much now not to lose contact.  "Memory can be an art," she said schoolmarmishly.  "Like architecture.   I think your ancestor would have understood that."
He lifted eyebrows and shoulders as though to say Who knows, or cares.
"Architecture, in fact," she said, "is frozen memory.  A great man said that."
"Hm."

"Many great thinkers of the past believed that the mind is a house, where memories are stored; and that the easiest way to remember things is to imagine an architecture, and then cast symbols of what you wish to remember on the carious places defined by the architect."

...Another thing about a memory house is that its builder and occupier can lose things in it just as you can in any house--the ball of string which you were certain you kept either with the stamps and the tape in the desk drawer or in the hall closet with the tackhammer and the picture wire, but which isn't in either place when you go to look for it.

 In the ordinary or Natural Memory such things can simply vanish; you don't even remember you forgot them.  The advantage of a memory house is that you know it's in there somewhere.

[Above excerpted from Little, Big by John Crowley, New York: Bantam Books, 1981.  My first foray into the works of John Crowley and I'm so glad I went with Joe Savino's recommendation of Little, Big.  I had no idea what to expect, as I did no advance research on the author or the novel.  This is a wonderful book.  538 pages of sheer beautiful otherworldliness.  I gave it four stars on Goodreads.  I couldn't give it five; I give Proust five.  Powys, Camus, Hesse, Duhamel, Dostoyevsky, Steinbeck five.  So this is as good as it can get.]

Left: John Crowley

Little, Big

by John Crowley