The Memory Palace

1) "Something moved me once. That's how all these stories begin for me. Some historical something, some fact or anecdote, came into my day—usually unannounced, over the radio, at a museum, in a text from a friend, on one of the seven hundred tabs open on my browser, or embedded in some larger work—and changed it. Somehow managed to cut through the whirr and sputter of life and moved me. Often I don't know why. That fascinates me."

2) "But scientists here on Earth couldn't signal back [to Mars]. They tried to think of a way. Global semaphore, someone proposed, would require flags the size of the state of Indiana and a flagpole that defied the laws of physics, not to mention handling procedures that would outstrip the capacity of even the most industrious Boy Scout troop. Contacting the Martians would take something else, another scientist suggested, something like draining Lake Superior, then filling it with gasoline and setting it on fire. The light could be seen from the surface of Mars, assuming folks there had a telescope at least as strong as Lowell's. But would they know it was a signal? Or would they just think we liked to set lakes on fire now and then?"

3) "There was the night she went dancing—she was twenty, and boys wanted to dance with her then, especially when she wore her red velvet dress—and one young man, tall and handsome, came up to talk to her. He told her how he wanted to be a scientist, a naturalist, and to study animals in Africa, and she asked him if he wanted to get out of there. They went down to the beach and the pier, where people like them didn't go, where there were honky-tonks and hot dog stands and the place where they spun sugar into cotton candy, and they wound up at this joint where they played jazz. They had never heard jazz before, but they soon found their rhythm, and they danced until the sun came up. Frances thanked the bandleader on her way out, saying that it had been the best night of her life. Three nights later, three nights after seeing her in her red velvet dress, Frederick Hamerstrom asked Frances to marry him. She asked what had taken him so long."

4) "To this day, historians debate whether Thomas Faunce's memory, at ninety-five, was accurate. And whether that specific rock—or any rock, for that matter—played any particular role in the Pilgrims' arrival. But it is clear that it didn't hold any real significance, practical or sentimental, to the Pilgrims themselves, because they basically wrote everything down, and no one ever mentioned it. Instead, the thing that makes this rock "Plymouth Rock" is poetry. There is something moving about this ninety-five-year-old man being moved. There's something romantic about the idea that this, right here, on this spot, this is where it all began. That is where it all began for the idea of Plymouth Rock, at least—when they built the wharf in a different spot and started to protect this rock and turn it into a relic, a symbol of freedom, a tie to a glorious past, an object worthy of veneration, and apparently of being dug up by a bunch of dudes gathered at the waterside to stick it to England."

5) "The cable didn't say how her husband had died. Neither did his obituary. A big one, in The New York Times, befitting the scion of a wealthy family, long familiar to the readers of the paper's society pages. William Hunter Harkness was a handsome Harvard man turned explorer, which was a type of guy in the early 1930s."

6) "It was 1839. He was sixty-four. During all the years he'd spent dragging Versailles around, trying to convince America that he was its greatest painter, he'd barely painted. He was rusty. And he knew it. So he went back to France, thinking that being there would inspire him, would help get him back to where he'd been before, to when he was young and everything felt so full of promise. He found that Versailles hadn't changed. The same mist from the same fountains in the same breeze, the same long shadows as the day grew late. But he had changed. As one does. He was heartbroken, he wrote, to be reminded of who he'd been those years before. A young American, standing in this garden, imagining painting this garden and all that painting this garden was going to bring."

7) "I like the new picture more. My grandparents as just two people figuring it out. It isn't the cover photo for some classic love story. It isn't love itself, but it may be life itself: one of those in-between moments you don't remember later. The in-between feelings you can't quite put a name to. The space between the story of our lives and those lives as we live them. I love that space and the magic that seems to exist in a place between and beyond concrete facts and the well-worn language of familiar stories. I love the spark that is kindled there, to flare just long enough to help us remember that life, in the present as in the past, is more complicated and more interesting and more beautiful and more improbable and more alive than we'd realized the moment before. That notion animates every story I try to write. I want to conjure the magic that lies in the liminal spaces between the plot points in people's lives."

8) "But here was Marconi near the end of his life, growing weaker and weaker with each heart attack. Dreaming of a device that would let him hear these lost sounds, that would let him tap in to these eternal frequencies. He would tell people that if he got it right, he would be able to hear Jesus of Nazareth giving the Sermon on the Mount. He would be able to hear everything that had ever been said. Everything he himself ever said. At the end of his life, he could sit in his piazza in Rome and hear everything that was ever said to him or about him. He could relive every toast and testimonial. We all could. Hear everything. Hear Marco Polo talk to Genghis Khan. Hear Shakespeare give an actor a line reading. Hear my grandmother introduce herself to my grandfather at a nightclub in Rhode Island. Hear someone tell you they love you, the first time they told you they loved you. Hear everything, forever."