There are two new books of letters that I yearn to acquire. One includes those between Elizabeth Bishop and her various editors at The New Yorker. The other collects the correspondence between Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, presumably those he wrote in his role as her editor at the magazine, but also outside it. They were friends, as a lot of folks were with him in his years there. I have to have both books, but, as usual with my Amazon carts, I hesitate, I wait, I fill up, empty, tinker with the selection, waffle, then finally muster up enough oomph to checkout.

Before he checked out, Maxwell was interviewed on a public television special about the 1918 flu epidemic. His early memories were outstandingly vivid of that time (he was nine), and he had quite a bit to say of both personal and historical value. He’s also written about these years in memoirs. If I’m remembering correctly, the riveting part of his interview was his claim that everything he ever experienced remained in his mind. “It’s all still there,” he said. He may have said this more than once in different places; if he did I conflate the interviews.

Significantly, he insisted that it was the same for everyone, and I believe him. He said you had to find a way to tap that great store of memory, and there was no denying it was a long way away, but it still resided there. Perhaps it was only our deficiency or the untried and forbidding paths of memory that didn’t invite us to go back among the ghosts of our long past, but those ghosts were there, and we could speak to them.

This has always been a comfort to me: that we contain the enormous store of our previous life, every instant, and that it moves inside us even when the present closes in so tightly we can’t see out. There are times, often in the warm moments between wakefulness and sleep, when I can feel the gray wind across my open backyard when I was five, smell the woody hallway to my bedroom, taste the iron water from the fountain outside my classroom door. And a million other moments. That they are gone as quickly as I recognize them is unimaginably sad; but knowing they still breathe somewhere far away, but not inaccessibly so, is a grace.