Virtual Memories

This morning’s reading, from Love & Sleep, the second novel in John Crowley’s Ægypt series:

But even if those fires really were the same fire — if both had been the one that began at the Oliphant’s trash baskets beside the old garage, in that summer of 1952 — still it might have been the Salamander who started it: might have been the Salamander who snatched the burning paper from Pierce’s rake, and blew it into the waiting mulleins and the milkweed. He experienced, and not for the first time this week, this winter, the sensation that he was simply creating the story backward from this moment, reasons and all. But isn’t that what memory is always doing? Making bricks without straw, mortaring them in place one by one into a so-called past, a labyrinth actually, in which to hide a monster, or a monstrosity?