Last week I met up with my English teacher.  We have seen each other occasionally over the years, perhaps once a decade since she taught me at ‘A’ level many years ago.   And it occurred to me that there are few people in my life now who knew me at 17.  My close friendships date from university and later; my brother is the only member of my family who knew me as a child and is still living.

So meeting my English Teacher was a precious encounter.  It stirred dusty memories of Eliot and Beckett, discussions on plot and character in Antony and Cleopatra.   Remembering my 17-year old self is, however, fraught with embarrassment. How should I judge the earnest enthusiasms which drove me then, the strength of emotion and conviction which coloured my thoughts and actions?

But surely I could – I must – extend the same generosity and tolerance to my previous self that I would try to show to others now.  However discomfiting the encounter, perhaps I would still want to rendezvous with this younger self. These younger selves.  We live so strongly in the present moment, we are always so mindful of the future (whether feared or desired).  I spend far too little time thinking about, protecting my sense of my past.

Actual memories are elusive, evasive, wisps of sensation. A moment in a baker’s shop, looking up at my mother and realising that she was a separate person, with her own thoughts and consciousness; climbing the stairs to the local library, on the top floor of a small terrace house – enormous steep stairs, or so they seemed, from which I deduce that I was probably still quite young. But these are so disconnected.  I need to be less careless of these fragile fragments, try to recollect more consciously, gather and protect them.

And I do think it matters. Our sense of self, our identity, is shaped by the way we are connected to the people and world around us – like an Anthony Gormley figure which is created by the lines surrounding it. Above all we are defined by chronology, by the shape of a temporal life. So we are described as much by our own past and future selves as we are by our relationships with others.  We are often told that we shouldn’t dwell on the past or let it haunt us, and I realise, of course, that for some revisiting the past would be too painful.  So I don’t mean to endorse this for all: that is, as Feste says, out of my welkin.  But unless we recall and record our past experiences, they will be lost and, for many, the past may be full of kindly ghosts.

Of course memories are notoriously unreliable, malleable, partisan and flawed.  So perhaps it is only by crafting these tenuous moments into some shape and sequence that I can create something that I will be able to ‘remember’ more readily.  If dismember means to take apart, then is remembering a rebuilding, a putting together of fragments to create a new whole?  Inevitably this may make a new creature, like Frankenstein, but that may be the only way to retain any sense of our past selves at all.