What's Up With the Way Less Than Adequate Time/Memory Connection?

"Almost every hour I spend with my children is burned through like money by a man on a spree. The sum total of my clear memories of them - of their unintended aphorisms, gnomic jokes, and the plain sad truths they have expressed about the world; of incidents of precociousness, Gothic madness, sleepwalking, mythomania, and vomiting; of the way light has struck their hair or eyelashes on vanished afternoons; of the stupefying tedium of games we have played on rainy Sundays; of highlights and horrors from their encyclopedic history of odorousness; of the 297,000 minor kvetchings and heart felt pleas i have responded to over the past eleven years with fury, tenderness, utter lack of interest, or a heartless and automatic compassion - those memories, when combined with the sum total of photographs, that we have managed to take, probably add up, in all four of my children, to under 1 percent of everything that we have undergone, lived through, and taken pleasure in together." -- Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon is a Pulitzer prize winning author (Wonder Boys, A Model World, Gentlemen of the Road, the screenlay for Spiderman 2, Manhood For Amateurs, among others) and a father of four who lives in Berkeley, California with his wife, author Ayelet Waldman.