These are musings inspired by the poem Love after Love by Derek Walcott. I might continue with this, I might not, who knows.
Disclaimer: I don't own Artemis Fowl.
Love after Love by Derek Walcott
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Artemis Fowl would never forget the time he remembered. Even after all the weird and wonderful events that have occurred since its return, he still claimed that remembering his real past was the strangest. It was like discovering a whole new you.
Things that he believed to have happened, he now realised, didn't. The fairy memories slotted themselves into position, jostling the fake memories aside, but he still remembered them. Does that mean that they happened? Artemis wondered one day, if I can still remember them?
I know that they didn't; I know now that they didn't at any rate. But at some point in my life, I believed that they did.
Does that mean that they did, even if they occurred inside my mind?
It was an intriguing philosophical concept. He must write about it someday.
Artemis replayed the memories of two years in his mind, the fake ones and the real ones. He also knew that what really happened prior to kidnapping Holly – the whole incidence with the Extinctionists and silky sifaka lemur – which had merged somewhat with his concocted childhood memories.
And now he lay in cell in Haven, battling a depressing "knight-in-shining-armour" alter ego. I could consider that I have three personalities, Artemis thought: the person I was before I met the People, the person I am now and this hopeless romantic with a fixation to poor Holly.
That was going in the book too. It would be about how experiences and memories change who we are, Artemis Fowl, author of several psychology books already, a deep psychological and philosophical novel.
Artemis wondered briefly whether his past self, himself before the mind wipe, had contemplated what if would feel like to remember everything all over again. That was the one thing Artemis could not remember clearly. He had imagined what it would be like to feel your thoughts and memories try and slot themselves into places new memories had taken root. Could he have pictured what it was like to have memories battle for superiority inside his head?
If I can remember them, does that mean that they happened?
Obviously what he had previously believed to have happened with the lemur hadn't happened. He had been severely off track with that one. So clearly all the other concocted memories must not have happened.
But I can remember them, Artemis thought, what if they did?
No wonder I'm in a psychiatric ward.
Who knows if I continue with this. I may have to finish a few other fanfics before I do. What do you think?