Squawk, memory!

The young right-wing activist was assassinated, and a new man was crowned the world’s richest. Scientists are pretty sure they’ve found evidence of ancient life on Mars, and a Mercedes EV drove 749 miles on a single charge. A new iPhone is very thin, and the makers of Wegovy plan to lay off 9,000 workers. There are new movies and comic books and TV shows and restaurants — this is the season of the Fall Preview — and there are deaths and death threats, denunciations and deportations, defundings and defangings, and even some terrible things that don’t start with the letter d. Everything is happening all at once, there’s nothing we can do about any of it, it hurts to try to take it all in, let alone process it, yet here we are — here I am — taking it all in, processing it and processing it, and spitting it back out at you.

Plus, as I write this, it’s September 11.

Sometimes memory feels like a curse. My memory, that is. All these details — names, places, dates, smells, emotions, some monumental, most irrelevant — are locked away in the vault of my brain, but they fill it up, they leak out, they shove their way to the front, and I feel compelled to give them their mental due, committing them to the page, but just as often asking why they persist while others do not. I know a bank teller made me cry when I was 10 or 11, but not how; I recall every hurt and injury and humiliation for which I’ve been responsible — why can’t those fade? Instead, I feel responsible for remembering when others forget, and take to heart my failings when my recollections lapse.

Not long ago, I dug a bag full of negatives out of a cardboard box and brought them to Manhattan to get scanned. There were about 50 rolls, all shot between 1996 and 2003 or 2004, when I got my first digital camera. Altogether, that’s at least 1,500 images, from New York, Paris, Ho Chi Minh City, Taipei, Phnom Penh, and beyond, and the very strange thing is that, when I scroll through them now on my computer, I can remember taking every single one of them.

This is not to say I remember the names of every subject, or the precise location and circumstances of every composition. But when I see the images now, I’m re-seeing them. I remember the moment, decades ago, that that specific arrangement of shapes, scenery, color, and light entered my retina — the instant that whatever was happening around and in front of me crystallized into a memory that’s now as pure and immutable as a diamond.

For a while, in my heyday as a travel writer, that I thought I could make it as a travel photographer as well. When I was on long trips as the New York Times Frugal Traveler, there was no one around but me to shoot my adventures, and the paper gladly ran my amateurish pics. Later, I got nicer cameras and kept shooting, and the paper kept running — and eventually even paying for — those images. Maybe, I thought, one day I could even give up writing?

But when I look at them now, I don’t really like the images. They’re a little too glossy, a little too pretty, a little too illustrational. I was trying too hard. And what I was trying too hard to do was to make images — images I thought my photo editors would appreciate, images that seemed like the kind that would run atop a New York Times travel article. And that may in fact be what they were. But that also means they don’t really function as memories in the same way as my earlier photos. On a technical level, those were even more amateurish. Most are junky, disposable, blurry, over- or underexposed. Those flaws, however, are what make them feel real to me, what connect them to a reality that I’ve inhabited and that is increasingly lost.

When I started out as a travel writer, I used to take a lot of written notes. In one of the filing cabinets here, I have piles and piles of Pantone spiral notebooks, filled with details that, even if you could decipher my sloppy scrawl, you would find utterly useless. I know I did. I would come back from a trip, sit down at my computer to write the article, notebook at my side, and quickly discover that all of the important details were already in my head, while the notebooks held nothing I ever needed beyond a quote or two that I’d jotted down surreptitiously. Still, I could not remember every detail — the color of the walls, the style of a dress — and I found myself turning instead to the (digital) photos I’d taken for reference. I took lots, and they captured everything, even the elements I didn’t know I’d later need. As the years and assignments rolled on, I took more pictures and fewer notes.

Today, looking at all of these old photos is like looking at those old notebooks. They are full of details, but not always the ones I’d hoped to find. Where is the lobby of the Lucy Hotel, where I lived on arriving in Vietnam in 1996? Where are my colleagues from my first job in New York? Why didn’t I take more pictures of the food — the dumplings, the phở, the french fries? Why didn’t I take more time to think about what I might want to remember? We tend to imagine the pre-iPhone past as an era when film was expensive and therefore each shot was considered and composed with care. But no! I took craploads of photos, all the time, everywhere I went, without any consideration for whether I — or anyone — might want to see these images. And in taking those pictures, I allowed the moments into my memory, as randomly and permanently as all the other ones I didn’t shoot. Only with these, there’s proof.

When I brought the negatives in to be scanned, I was a little worried I was succumbing to nostalgia. And you know I hate nostalgia. I don’t like the ease with which so many people so comfortably look back on the past with fondness, often while despising the present. I didn't want to fall into that trap with these images. I knew they would represent my youth, and I was afraid I’d see it and sigh and long for the openness and freedom of my twenties.

Instead, they simply seem strange. They are my memories, but their randomness and their technical flaws mute their emotional impact. They remind me that Matt Gross as a young man was a very different person from the 51-year-old writing these words. What caught his eye, what led him around his city and around the world — I recognize these things as belonging to me, but I don’t know if I “miss” them or wish I could live that particular life again. Often I’m just mystified that that young person became me. How?

And this is the nostalgia I’m more comfortable with — the ancient Greek version that blended algia, or pain, with nostos, or homecoming. To come home was always the great desire for the seafaring heroes of myth (and presumably the real-life Greeks who invented their stories), but they were always highly aware that the home they’d return to would not be the one they’d left, and that reconciling that gap — between, as I always say, what’s expected and what’s experienced — was one of the most profound human endeavors. We dream of returning to the past we adore, even as we know it’s beyond our reach; and if somehow we achieve that miracle, we know well before the thunderclap and lightningstrike that it was also a mistake.

So many of these photos are stories in themselves — except that I don’t know the story. I’ve forgotten the context, I don’t know every name. But as a (recovering) journalist, I’m tempted to report them out, to dig into these lost pasts, collect the evidence, interview the witnesses, and assemble the narratives. Go on, assign me 1,000 words — see if I won’t do it! The rate’s still a buck a word, right?

I don’t know what that would get me. Closure? Insight? Maybe it would finally let me put my junk drawer of a brain in some kind of order for once. Honestly, these days, that would be enough. 🪨🪨🪨