But even if all that lasts of the great memory machine of the past fortnight is the stuff that dreams are made on in a few million young – and old – imaginations, then you might argue it will have fulfilled its purpose.
Her seven-year-old imagination replicated those stories, however incongruous they were to her own African reality.
Georgie's nine-year-old imagination embarks on some arresting and creepy peregrinations to make sense of her predicament in the context of 70s Dublin, where no recognition of such a predicament exists.
It was not the dimming of the sun that fired his five-year-old imagination, but the fact that someone had been able to calculate exactly at what time the moon would be in the right place to bring it about.
Speaking of her ardent affection for McCullers, the novelist with "the face of a wise old child, but also of a film noir antihero," Ms. Vega recalls the moment when her 17-year-old imagination was sparked by the searching appeal in McCullers's dark eyes and tough, set mouth.
To the outsider, it would be easy to dismiss this vision as nothing more than a false memory, either a recent invention or the rumblings of my six-year-old imagination.
We wanted to be the ones at the end of the earth as far away from the cold February Indiana rain as our 12-year-old imaginations would allow.
But the stubborn and lucky few who refuse ever to believe they are "too old" for imagination are also those who wisely come to understand that "sometimes there was great truth in made-up stories".
And just a bit of old fashioned imagination, really".
