drag behind


Senior Member
Hi all, please explain this sentence to me.

"We had never talked about our pasts, beyond the broadest details of place and family temperament. When we were together, memory dragged behind consciousness on a shortened rope and any event more than a day or two old fell away into prenatal darkness."

  • Starfrown

    Senior Member
    English - US
    Imagine consciousness as a horse and memory as a plow being pulled behind it. The horse moves forward linearly in time, and as it moves, so does the plow. When the horse first passes a point, it signifies the moment of conscious experience, after some time, memory also passes this point, and then the detail of the moment is forgotten. As you know, this is roughly how consciousness and memory work. In this case, the shortened rope indicates that their memories did not extend back as far as normally would be the case--they forgot events "more than a day or two old."

    This is how I see it.
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