But here's what's odd: not only must he remain undisturbed by the live grenade in his hands, he must also retain, in his mind's eye, the detached view of the man sitting in the pillbox on the rim of the stadium.
That is how readers retain in their minds a sense of the character "Isabel Archer", even if they cannot tell you what she is exactly like.
A former Auschwitz prisoner, Waedyslaw Bartoszewski asks that question in a most piercing way: "Millions of people around the world know what Auschwitz was, but it is basic that we retain in our minds and memories awareness that it is humans who decide whether such a tragedy will ever take place again.
If it is objected that all these things are ultimately dependent on images and sensations first gleaned from the world by the senses, this might be granted, on the condition that the sensory experience retained in the mind is understood to have the character the mind has given it.
By some unknown means, the character of his species had left its mark on her, but no one knew how: was it, as some thought, a mental impression, an idea of quagga-ness that the mare retained in her mind?
Rather, he reported that he used his ears widely and followed what was good in what he had heard and used his eyes widely and retained in his mind what he had seen.
We cannot begin to legislate (as we always suspected, and as Proust had the stamina to confirm) for what will or will not be retained in the mind's eye, or in the crannies of a bad memory.
But what we remember isn't a matter of will or choice, and what is retained in the mind can easily become a burden.
For example, in The Psychology of Imagination (1940), Sartre argues that Husserl remains captive to the idealist principle of immanence (the object of consciousness lies within consciousness), despite his stated goal of combating idealism, when he seems to consider images as miniatures of the perceptual object reproduced or retained in the mind.
An intuitive realist, primarily concerned with expressive rather than formal values, he developed a kind of visual mnemonics: "the retaining in my minds eye without drawing on the spot whatever I wanted to imitate".
