Trinkets in Time

IF YOU were to tell your life story, how would you prove it is true?  In his moving new book, The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes grapples to answer this question with a twisting and mysterious tale.

The crisp 163 page novella is divided into two parts.  In the first part, the book’s narrator and protagonist, Tony Webster, recounts a time from his school days when he spent an uncomfortable weekend at his girlfriend’s parent’s house and when his overly clever philosopher friend commits suicide. Webster ruminates on these memories some 40 years later in the book’s second part. In piecing together his past, Webster finds that his life story is not as obvious and easily told as he might have imagined.

Webster identifies two different standards of time he can use to tell his story: an objective timeline and a subjective timeline. In the objective sense, his life is a series of cause-and-effect events that pass regularly to the tick-tock of a universal clock. But in subjective time his past is composed of his personal memories, which he learns are malleable and warped by emotion and pleasure.

Ultimately he discovers that a paradox arises in choosing which measure best captures his life. The objective standard is too impersonal; it lacks a human quality. The subjective standard, on the other hand, is too personal; his memories are too skewed by his own personal biases to give a trustworthy account of his life. To be sure, Webster concludes that the best measure of his past is where the two meet: it is where his personal memories are corroborated by physical evidence.

For me, this realization explains why I cherish mementos so much. I cannot rely solely on my memories to accurately explain my history. But the love letter I wrote my wife shortly after we began dating is proof that the butterflies I remember feeling then were real. The crumpled boutonnière locked in a chest in the attic is evidence that my homecoming date was not imagined. And the picture of my wife and daughter on my desk at work corroborates my belief that family matters.

Mementos, if the fictional character Tony Webster were asked, would likely explain them as a concrete manifestation of the place that objective and subjective time meet. For me, they’re proof that the life I remember having lived actually happened. And I keep my mementos close because if you lose a piece of your past you lose a piece of yourself.

Trent Latta is an attorney and a current member of Kirkland's Cultural Council.  He may be reached at TrentLatta@gmail.com.