The older we become, the more memory keeps us company, guides our steps, and delivers clarity. It is a simple manner of time: time that lies ahead is nothing compared to the time in the rearview.

Individuals in that twilight stage of life walk through memory like a forest, observing the individualities as they go. “Nighttime walk on a clear night,” wrote journalist and historian Jan Morris when she was well into her 90s, “Is one of the largest experiences one can have.” At night on those walks, memory meets our consciousness in the dark and expands us beyond the immediate. Two years before she died in 2020, Morris published a journal of daily thoughts often inseparable from memory. It might even be fair to say they are directed by memory, like this passage written on the first day of the journal:

I am a strong believer in the strength of Routine, and conceiving and writing these inconsequential little pieces has become virtually mechanical in itself, like many another petty compulsion. My mother, who was partly of Quaker stock, would never dream of placing another volume on top of her Bible, and pagan agnostic that I am, I still find myself involuntarily touching wood (i.e. touching the wood of the Cross) to avert bad luck. And I don't know about you, but in my everyday affairs too, there are personal routines, edging into such superstitions, that I feel I must honour.

I love comparing Morris's writing to that of her contemporary, Dame Penelope Lively (born March 17, 1933). Lively is a British novelist and Booker Prize winner who, unlike Morris, is mainly known for fiction; both hold a mirror to memory and use it to guide twilight thoughts.

In her memoirs, Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir, Lively writes:

A view of age itself, this place at which we arrive with a certain surprise—ambushed, or so it can seem. The view from eighty, for me. One of the few advantages of age is that you can report on it with a certain authority; you are a native now and know what goes on here. That, and the backward glance—the identifying freight of a lifetime.

To Lively, memory functions as a ballast keeping us anchored in meaning; "the mind needs a tether," but it also releases us from the "hideous, eternal present." Memory pulls us into and through time. As it does, we form ourselves. It will always represent something we have but cannot have; it meets us when we prepare and wait. A night walk becomes a gargantuan experience.

This ballast takes physical space when it fills our lives. In his last published essays, neurologist Oliver Sacks, who maneuvered his collected elements, Lively lines up her thoughts next to collected things (like the great ammonites of the title).

I have the great sustaining ballast of memory; we all do, and hope to hang on to it. I am interested in this way that memory works, in what we do with it, and what it does to us. And when I look around my cluttered house—more ballast, material ballast—I can see myself oddly identified and defined by what is in it: my life charted out on the bookshelves, my concern illuminated by various objects.

Six million-year-old ammonites. They are always cold to the touch. I purchased them at an antique fair after reading Lively's book. We collect simple objects because they give meaning, speak of us, and hold memory. After her daughter died, Joan Didion scraped through her daughter's things to cope with loss and retain her memory as a companion for the future. Our homes are full of things made beautiful through memory, items of great value for their sentiment, and through sentiment, companionship.

I've written much about memory, how it haunts us and holds us captive with false promises and a pink wash of reality. But mostly, memory keeps us company. At times, it's the closest ally we have. I often wonder what memory looks like, what it would be if we entered it. Would it have corridors? Doors or windows? Or would it be a vast open space?

"Introspection" by Isobel Egan. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

In Dancing Fish and Ammonites, Lively distinguishes between types of memory; like the things we casually recall as needed, and the "moth-eaten type," we carry around all the time, which forms our self-image. That could be what critic Walter Benjamin meant when he said memory is consciousness. We can only look into memory when considering who or what we are. The present flits away, and the future is non-existent.

Lively continues:

We are all of us palimpsests; we carry the past around, it comes surging up whether or not we want it; it is an albatross and a crutch.

Ammonites were sea animals that lived between 65 and 250 million years ago; their chambers were vacated as they grew and therefore measured age. "Why were there so many different types of ammonites?" queried David Attenborough in his memoirs. Touchable time.

British essayist Laurie Lee prefers to enter memory directly rather than view it from afar. In his writing, he throws memory's cozy comfort around him and seems to exist again as he did once before.

I was going to write: I am no longer aspirational. But that is not quite true. I do aspire in terms of wanting to do what I do as well as possible. I would still like to write a good book. But I don't have that ferocity for achievement that I can remember from my early writing days: write a good book or bust. I have never been particularly competitive - writers can be competitive, a trait fostered by the spectator sport of literary prizes.

Lively has this to say of old age: desires and drives have gone. "But what remains is the response. I am as alive to the world as I have ever been—alive to everything I see and hear and feel."

Lively turned 91 in 2024; I keep close track of her throughout the year (her status, shall we say) and love to imagine her out in the world somewhere, holding ammonites or pacing at night. Read more from her gifted thoughts on the symbiosis between gardening and writing or my collection of ideas from those in their twilight years. Equally curious is Katie Roiphe's impassioned book that assembles almost witness-like accounts of writers near death and, finally, a few thoughts on the space and shape of memory.