When we say we are "moved"

Jenny Odell, in Saving Time, writes a stanza of Peter Handke's poem song of childhood from Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire.  (When the child was a child) (Lied Vom Kindsein)

This poem illustrates Frankl's notion that to be human is to be directed to something other than oneself... It also explains why, in those moments of true encounter that unsettle the boundary between myself and something or someone else -- when time seems to stop, then expand -- I sometimes notice a strange side effect. Like an oceanic upwelling, long-buried memories come to the surface: images and states of mind I remember from childhood, from college, from my early adult life.  These memories are often of similar moments of encounter, as though under the grid of calendar years and career milestones there were another dimension, one where all these encounters spilled into one another. Bergson might identify this as the dimension of "the deep-seated self," arguing that the truest, most willful actions are the ones that come from it.  When we say we are "moved," I think it is this self, not just today's self, that is moved. (255-256)

Two things I like here.  One is Odell's naming and talking about the time-stopping moments, the moments of "true living and connection."  These moments are for me what I'm always seeking out throughout my life... whether thru the feeling of sitting a bench after a hard run and seeing the world "more clearly" or from college experiments with hallucinogens to a series of journal writing and blog posts of trying to identify that special state of being.  I love that Odell is using this book to capture that state.

Second, I am interested in the "upwelling" of memories.  Recently, I've been trying to capture those "places" that memory brings me at random times. I have a place in my Field Notes to write them down.  Like dreams, the come and fade and are irretrievable.  The connection Odell talks about is not -- to me -- readily apparent.  I did recently think to draft a pantoum with these memories as the subject.