So Long Ago by Richard Bausch

I found "So Long Ago" by Richard Bausch to be captivating and thoroughly intriguing that I had to read it a few times over, each time finding something new and important to the story that he tells.  This style of non-fiction reads somewhat like a memoir, but it is the metacommentary of the piece that I found to be the most fascinating, the way that he describes his current view on his recollections, memories, and thoughts.  Bausch effectively makes use of the concept of pathos in many instances; in doing so, the reader is able to empathize with Bausch in his reflections concerning the nature of memories.

One of the first instances of pathos in which I could feel Bausch's sorrow was in this passage:

And then one winter evening, as we were riding in the car on the way to a movie, I asked him about Iowa again, and he recalled nothing—it was all simply gone. I asked him about the swing set, the sandbox, the park, the train, the Ferris Wheel, even the Buffalo. To each one he said, “No.” Innocently, simply, without the slightest trace of perplexity or anything of what I was feeling, which was sorrow. You could see him striving to get something of it back, but it was like a game, and there was nothing. No, he had no recollection of any of it.

I think this is a great example of pathos because Bausch describes something to which many people can relate:  forgetting.  In this case, Bausch is writing about his attempt to instill beautiful childhood memories in his kid.  Unfortunately, despite his efforts, his child still forgets the wonder of Iowa.  He feels sorrow for this, but ultimately, he must accept that forgetting is part of life, and that not all memories are destined to stay in the mind.  I found this kind of loss tragic yet truthful.  It's a fact of life that we all must face regarding the curious nature of memories.

The next example of pathos that resonated with me was this passage:

I suppose I have to admit that it might just be impossible to have it both ways: to claim that I was not that hypersensitive romantic figure, the artist-as-a-young man, and still report the impressions of a moment like that one, standing over the body of a woman who had lived a life so separate from mine, and nothing like mine, and whose reality could not have anticipated that she would be a figure in my speech, a character in a story I would tell, even as she told me about all the living she had seen and done, and I pretended to listen. In any case, I do not mean this the way it will sound. I mean to express the quality of a memory, in order to say something about this life we live, so much of which is fugitive, so much of which is lost in the living of it.

This passage was really important to me and displayed the essence of pathos quite well.  I think this paragraph has gravitas, the substance that we are after in our own writing.  His sentence "I mean to express the quality of a memory, in order to say something about this life we live, so much of which is fugitive, so much of which is lost in the living of it."  I think this sentence displays an excellent use of pathos because it is so universal.  I think at some point in time we all feel like slaves to our own lives, as if we have no control over the circumstances to which we appear bound.  I think this statement is somewhat melancholic, but it is something to which we all can respond and feel.

My last example of pathos is the following passage:

We come from the chaos of ourselves to the world, and we yearn to know what happened to all the others who came before us. So we impose Time on the flow of events, and call it history. For me, Memory is always story. True memory is nothing like the organized surface of a story, yet that is all we have to tell it, and know it, and experience it again: but if we are doomed to put our remembered life into stories, we are blessed by it, too.

This passage is probably my favorite, and I think it may be the passage which invokes the most emotion, too.  I think Bausch's use of patho is evident here because he describes something that is once again universal, the way we remember things.  "True memory is nothing like the organized surface of a story" is a great sentence that can be understood by anyone.  Our memories do not operate that way, but we can form them into a story and that is the only way we can tell it.  The last sentence in the passage is something that displays a lot of gravitas.  Sure, we may be "doomed" by the fact that our memories can only be recounted in stories, but this is a blessing, too, because it shows that we have stories to share and that we can relate to other human beings.