I keep circling back to a line from Vladimir Nabokov, because it has become the operating principle behind a 50 Years On project I began 14 months ago.
(Nabakov dreaming of his first true love Tamara)
"It's a matter of love; the more you love a memory, the stronger that memory becomes."
When I first read it, I took it at face value—something about nostalgia, perhaps even indulgence. But working my way back through sixteen years of daily diary entries, written between the ages of 13 and 29, I've come to see that Nabokov is describing something far more exacting.
Relationships when you're a teenager are an adventure, full of risk, disaster, loss, gains, highs and lows. I was crushed a couple of times, weren't you?
Love, in this sense, is not sentiment. It is attention. Sustained, forensic, almost stubborn attention.
Because the truth is, when I originally wrote these entries, often picking through a relationship, or an encounter, I didn't love them, I barely even saw them. They were quick notations at the end of the day—compressed, coded, functional:
"Tried to ring Cece… she is out… Tracey has been telling her about me… I am in trouble."
That was enough for the boy writing it. It captured the event. It marked the day. It moved things on.
But returning to it fifty years later, I find myself drawn into it in a completely different way. I linger. I question. I reconstruct. And in doing so, something quite extraordinary happens.
The memory strengthens.
Not because it becomes more accurate in some forensic sense, but because it becomes more complete. What was once a thin line on a page begins to expand into a full social and emotional landscape. I can see the network around that moment: who is speaking to whom, how information is travelling, how reputations are forming and unravelling. I can see myself within it—not just what I did, but how I behaved.
At sixteen, I wrote: "She's the one!"
At sixty-four, I can see the anxiety, the exposure, the loss of control beneath that word.
That depth was always present.
But it required attention—perhaps even a kind of love—to bring it into focus.
The same thing happens elsewhere. A failed goodbye kiss, barely noted at the time, becomes—on revisiting—a pivot point:
"We were starting to see each other differently… I was playing a game … she was a hesitant participant."
That phrase, "playing the game," is not in the original Diary. It emerges only now, with hindsight. And yet it feels true—truer, perhaps, than anything I could have written at the time. It captures a pattern of behaviour I was enacting without fully understanding it: testing boundaries, accumulating experiences, not quite grasping the emotional cost.
This is where Nabokov's idea begins to reveal its full force. The memory does not sit there waiting to be retrieved. It grows stronger in proportion to the attention we give it. The more closely I examine these moments, the more detail they yield. The more detail they yield, the more they begin to live again.
And that is where the project tips into something that feels very close to time travel.
Not the romantic notion of stepping back into the past unchanged, but something more layered. I have, in front of me, three versions of each moment:
The event as it happened.
The brief entry was written that same day.
And the reconstruction I am building now.
When I hold those three together, something shifts. I am no longer simply remembering—I am observing my younger self in operation. I can see what he is doing, often more clearly than he could. I can see the patterns he repeats: the multiple phone calls, the overlapping romantic pursuits, the careful management (or mismanagement) of information, the idea of finding a "proper girlfriend" while simultaneously scattering his attention in all directions.
At the time, it felt like energy. Like possibility.
Now, it reads as a system.
The Diary recorded the moves.
The revisiting reveals the rules.
And this is why a Diary on its own can feel, as I've often said, rather dull. It lacks selection, emphasis, and interpretation. It is life as it passes, not life as it is understood. But when I return to it—when I choose to linger over certain lines, to ask what sits beneath them, to connect one day to the next—it becomes something else entirely.
Not fiction.
But not a raw fact either.
Something composed.
There is, of course, a subtle tension here. The more I "love" these memories—the more I attend to them, shape them, illuminate them—the stronger they become. But stronger in what sense? Clearer? Or more constructed?
I suspect both.
And that is not a weakness in the process—it is the process. Because what I am really doing is not recovering a fixed past, but engaging in a dialogue with it. The boy who wrote those entries could not see the patterns he was part of. The man revisiting them cannot help but see them.
Somewhere between the two, something like truth begins to emerge.
So when Nabokov talks about loving a memory, I don't hear sentimentality. I hear discipline. The willingness to return, to look again, to stay with a moment long enough for it to reveal more than it first appears to contain.
And in doing so, something remarkable becomes possible.
I don't just remember who I was.
I begin to understand him.
And that, I think, is as close to time travel as one can get.