That was the purpose of habit, in my grandfather’s view: to render memory unnecessary.
Basically, we go through all the events that marked his life and turned it into a convoluted web of secrets and deceit. We follow him through his formative years and see the kinds of events that shaped him, we go to fight the enemy during the Second World War right alongside him, we see what married life is like, how prison was back in the older days, and so on and so forth. We see that he doesn’t have very long left to live, and before we know it we jump back in time a few decades to when the old man was just a little boy. The story doesn’t take very long to get started as the narrator introduces us to the grandfather, whom he never refers to by name. Thankfully, he decided to record this conversation, and now many years later he felt it was time to novelize the incredible life his grandfather has lived. In 1989 the author Michael Chabon was sitting at his dying grandfather’s bedside, and with his mind loosened by his impending death (and the medication) he proceeded to recount to his grandson many incredible stories that he had never heard. While countless such worlds have and will be lost in time, we still persevere in preserving them any way we can, if only for their exclusivity. While it might seem that people can be divided into large groups based on their many common experiences, the deeper you look into anyone’s life, the more it becomes apparent that the things they’ve lived through, their order and timing are all so unique that finding two people who have literally nothing to teach each other would be an extraordinary coincidence. The idea that taking a life is to extinguish an entire world isn’t a new one and definitely has some basis in logic and reality.
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