The Photograph's Lie
When memory quietly repaints a grey street gold
On my desk stands a photograph of the street where I was born, and I have looked at it for forty years.
For most of that time I believed it showed me the truth, and only lately have I begun to doubt it.
The photograph shows a row of pale houses, a tree, and a boy who might or might not be me.
In my memory that street is always golden, always warm, always full of a light that forgives everything.
But the photograph, when I look at it honestly, is grey, and the houses are rather plain.
It seems that memory has been quietly repainting the picture for as long as I have owned it.
What I remember, I now suspect, is not the street itself but my for the street.
is a poor , for it improves whatever it describes and never admits that it does so.
I have caught it adding a fountain that was never there, and softening a that certainly was.
The truth is that the street was often cold, and that we were frequently hungry there.
My mother wept in that plain house more than once, over money we did not have.
Yet the golden version persists, and it will not be corrected by any grey photograph.
Perhaps this is why exiles are dangerous when they speak of the countries they have lost.
We do not describe a place; we describe a wound, and call the wound by the place's name.
A younger man once asked me whether he should return to see his village again after many years.
I told him to be careful, for the real village might quietly murder the remembered one.
He went anyway, and came back strangely quiet, and never spoke of the village in the old way again.
Something had been taken from him, though what he lost was only an he had loved.
I have decided, therefore, never to go back, and to keep my golden street exactly as it is.
Some people call this , and perhaps, in a sense, they are not wrong.
But I would rather guard a beautiful lie than possess a true and worthless grey.
The photograph and the memory now sit side by side, and I no longer confuse them.
One is a record of what a camera saw; the other is a record of what a heart could not bear to lose.
I keep both, and I have learned to love the difference between them rather than to it.
For the difference is exactly the shape of everything I have carried out of that country.
lies, I know that now, but it lies in the direction of what we needed to survive.
And a lie that helps a man to live may deserve a gentler name than we usually give it.
So I dust the each morning, and I let the golden street go on shining a little longer.