within me
that collection of images without having ever so much as thought
either to imprint them, or set them in order. Moreover, all these
images either appear or retire as I please, without any confusion.
I call them back, and they return; I dismiss them, and they sink I
know not where. They either assemble or separate, as I please. But
I neither know where they lie, nor what they are. Nevertheless I
find them always ready. The agitation of so many images, old and
new, that revive, join, or separate, never disturbs a certain order
that is amongst them. If some of them do not appear at the first
summons, at least I am certain they are not far off. They may lurk
in some deep corner, but I am not totally ignorant of them as I am
of things I never knew; for, on the contrary, I know confusedly what
I look for. If any other image offers itself in the room of that I
called for, I immediately dismiss it, telling it, "It is not you I
have occasion for." But, then, where lie objects half-forgotten?
They are present within me, since I look for them there, and find
them at last. Again, in what manner are they there, since I look
for them a long while in vain? What becomes of them? "I am no
more," says St. Augustin, "what I was when I had the thoughts I
cannot find again. I know not," continues that father, "either how
it comes to pass that I am thus withdrawn from and deprived of
myself, or how I am afterwards brought back and restored to myself.
I am, as it were, another man, and carried to another place, when I
look for, and do not find, what I had trusted to my memory. In such
a case we cannot reach, and are, in a manner, strangers remote from
ourselves. Nor do we come at us but when we find what we are in
quest of. But where is it we look for but within us? Or what is it
we look for but ourselves? . . . So unfathomable a difficulty
astonishes us!" I distinctly remember I have known what I do not
know at present. I remember my very oblivion. I call to mind the
pictures or images of every person in every period of life wherein I
have seen them formerly, so that the same person passes several
times in my head. At first, I see one a child, then a young, and
afterwards an old, man. I place wrinkles in the same face in which,
on the other side, I see the tender graces of infancy. I join what
subsists no more with what is still, without confounding these
extremes. I preserve I know not what, which, by turns