Lost Worlds

On 4/8/10, I wrote about “book flashes,” the way in which odd bits and pieces of the many books I have read over many years sometimes suddenly and unpredictably flash through my head. In that post and in my 2/24/10 post on "books remembered and forgotten," I celebrated those strange but good occurrences. But there is another side to that experience: sometimes I feel sad about all the worlds I’ve inhabited for a few hours each, the worlds encompassed in the books I have read, worlds of which I can remember and/or revisit only a small part. Those worlds were so intensely felt for a few hours, and then they drifted into the vast inchoate mass of my fallible and inadequate memory. Of course I don’t believe they have all completely disappeared, and fortunately the best, the most impressive, the most powerful plots and characters and themes still usually stay with me, even if they are a little blurry around the edges. But what about all the others?