My First Memory

Charts & Graphs

My First Memory

The earliest recollections of great minds.

Lapham's Quarterly. Winter, 2019

• 

  Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910)

  “I lie bound and wish to stretch out my arms but cannot. I scream and cry, and my screams are disagreeable to myself, but I cannot stop. Someone—I do not remember who—bends over me…What remains on my memory is not my cries nor my suffering but the complexity and contradictoriness of the impressions. I desire freedom, it would harm no one, but I who need strength am weak, while they are strong.”

• 

  Amelia Edith Barr (1831–1919)

  “My first sharp, clear, positive recollection is a dream—a sacred, secret dream, which I have never been able to speak of. When it came to me, I had not the words necessary to translate the vision into speech, and as the years went on, I found myself more and more reluctant to name it. It was a vision dim and great that could not be fitted into clumsy words, but it was clearer and surer to me than the ground on which I trod.”

• 

  Carl Jung (1875–1961)

  “I am lying in a pram, in the shadow of a tree. It is a fine, warm summer day, the sky blue, and golden sunlight darting through green leaves. The hood of the pram has been left up. I have just awakened to the glorious beauty of the day and have a sense of indescribable wellbeing. I see the sun glittering through the leaves and blossoms of the bushes. Everything is wholly wonderful, colorful, and splendid.”

• 

  Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)

  “My earliest recollections are of being dressed up and allowed to come down to dance for a group of gentlemen who applauded and laughed as I pirouetted before them. Finally, my father would pick me up and hold me high in the air.”

• 

  Edith Wharton (1862–1937)

  “My first conscious recollection is of being kissed in Fifth Avenue by my cousin…I recall the satisfaction I felt in knowing that I had on my best bonnet, a very handsome bonnet made of a bright tartan velvet with a white satin ground, with a full ruffling of blond lace under the brim. Thus I may truly say that my first conscious sensations were produced by the two deepest-seated instincts of my nature—the desire to love and to look pretty.”

• 

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

  “It is of lying half-asleep, half-awake, in bed in the nursery at St. Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and then sending a splash of water over the beach...It is of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light and feeling it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive.”

• 

  Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)

  “Judging by the strong sunlight that...immediately invades my memory with lobed sun flecks through overlapping patterns of greenery, the occasion may have been my mother’s birthday, in late summer, in the country, and I had asked questions and had assessed the answers I received.”

• 

  Stephen Hawking (1942–2018)

  “My earliest memory is of standing in the nursery of Byron House School in Highgate and crying my head off. All around me children were playing with what seemed like wonderful toys, and I wanted to join in. But I was only two and a half, this was the first time I had been left with people I didn’t know, and I was scared.”

• 

  Agatha Christie (1890–1976)

  “I remember distinctly my third birthday. The sense of my own importance surges up in me. We are having tea in the garden...And then the exciting occurrence—a tiny red spider, so small that I can hardly see it, runs across the white cloth. And my mother says, ‘It’s a lucky spider, Agatha, a lucky spider for your birthday.’ ”