Writing in Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple recounts clearing out the vast accumulation of papers in his house, finding among them a letter from a condemned man, a Nigerian spiritual healer’s visiting card, and an advertising circular for fuss-free cremation: each prompting reflections on suffering, magical thinking, and the modern desire for technical solutions to intractable human problems.
I suppose these papers represented a biography of a kind, since they all referred either to some event in my life, or to an intellectual interest that I must have had at some time during it. It was startling to discover how much of my own life that I did not remember. The past is not only another country where they do things differently, as L.P. Hartley put it, but we seem to have been different people in our own pasts, connected to our present selves by a mere thread of fallible memory.