* A sample memory book is printed at the end of this volume.
People choose their own roads along which to travel. The most important thing is not to follow the manual but to tell about the very special things that only the writer has experienced. They don't need to be told about that. People think like that of their own accord. Everybody knows what is special about themselves, even if most people are modest enough to think they are no more than ordinary. But an ordinary person is always a person with unique and surprising experiences.
25
I spent a large part of one of the evenings I was in Uganda thinking about what precisely the memory of a person is. I thought about myself, of course. What do I want people to remember about me? What would I prefer to have suppressed? Do I have a number of secrets that I shall take with me to the grave? How can I shape other people's recollections of me?
It is an impossible task. I can hardly control what anyone else chooses to remember about me. I can only have a vague idea of what sort of an impression I have made. To some extent I can anticipate reactions to what I have written, what I have done in the theatre. But what about the memory of me as an individual? The child who was born in St Göran's Hospital in Stockholm at four o'clock in the morning of February 3, 1948?
I can guess that people's memories will vary. Some will remember me as a rather gloomy, possibly even melancholy person who needs to be left in peace and who can flare up if he's disturbed. Others will remember me as the opposite, a decent, cheerful person who will hardly be the last name to spring to mind when drawing up a guest list for a party.
I don't know what people will remember. Nor for how long. Memories are always finite. Memories of me will last for a number of years, but the day will come when they no longer survive. It is given to very few to live on beyond the memories of their grandchildren. After a hundred years most of us are one of the anonymous grey shadows in the blackness that surrounds us all.