Tan Twan Eng (Chinese: 陳團英; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Tân Thoân-eng) is a Malaysian novelist born in Penang in 1972.
Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, shifting with the movement of the clouds. Now and then the light will fall on a particular point in time, illuminating it for a moment before the wind seals up the gap, and the world is in shadows again.
Moments in time when the world is changing bring out the best and the worst in people.
Time is eating away my memory. Time, and this illness, this trespasser in my brain.
Memories I had locked away have begun to break free, like shards of ice fracturing off an arctic shelf. In sleep, these broken floes drift toward the morning light of remembrance.
Die while I can still remember who I am, who I used to be.
For what is a person without memories? A ghost, trapped between worlds, without an identity, with no future, no past.
The palest ink will endure beyond the memories of man
A raintree bent towards a window in one side of the bungalow, eavesdropping on the conversations that had taken place inside over years.
I have become a collapsing star, pulling everything around it, even the light, into an ever-expanding void. Once I lose all ability to communicate with the world outside myself, nothing will be left but what I remember. My memories will be like a sandbar, cut off from the shore by the incoming tide. In time they will become submerged, inaccessible to me. The prospect terrified me. For what is a person without memories? A ghost, trapped between worlds, without an identity, with no future, no past.
Accept that there are things in this world we can never explain and life will be understandable. That is the irony of life. It is also the beauty of it.
To have memories, happy or sorrowful, is a blessing, for it shows we have lived our lives without reservation.