IN PURSUIT OF THINGS PAST: DAVID SHAHAR AND THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN CURRENT ISRAELI FICTION

....in all of my encounters, not only with people but even with houses and trees and alleys and streets and sights and smells, I have always sensed something of the essence of the advent of memory. For all of them go on existing and living their lives year after year, even though they are situated outside the circles of our daily routines ? dead to us because they are external to us, outside our ken. Suddenly, their routines brush up against ours, and here they are rising up before us like Lazarus from the dead, to show us that their being dead to us was merely the result of the narrowness of the torch's beam, capable of illuminating only a small part of our path through the big, broad fields which lie outside our ken because of the curtain of darkness cutting them off from our field of vision, even when their abysses gape inside us.