Brandywine reflections

I recently visited Brandywine Battlefield State Park while doing some research for an article I wrote about the Revolutionary War. I had not been there since I was a small child, and I didn't have any clear  memories of the place. Just some fleeting impressions of running through tall grass, games of badminton, and images of children playing in dappled sunlight beneath a stand of trees on a lost summer's day.

Of course, the paucity of my recollection should come as no surprise, as the mind's eye is limited in terms of the visual impressions it can conjure from childhood. However, mental images of relatively poor quality are typical not just of early childhood memories, but usually memories in general. As evidence of the relatively weak powers of visual memory, one need only compare its faded stores, faintly traced in the mind's eye by withering neural pathways, to the limpidness of perception in the here and now.

While the clarity of perception stands in contrast to the haziness of visual memory, under certain circumstances, there is something of a subjective fusion between the realms of remembering and perceiving, and the two psychological domains, normally so distinct to us, are bridged by a point of contact provided by sensory impressions. A common example of this can be found when looking at your reflection in the water; the image, usually soft and blurred, is not a faded memory trace, but an immediate sensory impression gathered by your eyes. And yet, the reflection seems to resemble not a perception, but a memory, with many of the hazy impressions that characterize the mind's attempt to travel backwards in the 4th dimension.

I cannot count among my remembrances of childhood visits to Brandywine Battlefield any memories of looking at my reflection in the Brandywine River. I seem to have dull impressions of rocks and rushing black water, but the haze of childhood anamnesis makes it difficult to know if these are memories of the Brandywine or someplace else. At any rate, at that age the appearance of one's reflection in the water likely creates nothing more than a whirling eddy of curiosity in a child's stream of consciousness.

I imagine, however, that for many of the American and British soldiers, scouting the banks of the river on a hot day in September of 1777, seeing their reflection in the water produced a deeper experience. They were, no doubt, acutely aware of their own mortality, and I wonder how many of them, when they stopped along the banks of the Brandywine for a drink, paused when they saw their dull image in the glassy surface of the water. They must have wondered if they would soon cross a threshold from the realm of the living to that of the remembered, where all of us will reside one day as faded sketches, until these too are washed  away by the inexorable river of time.