“The more you remember, the more you’ve lost”

Kirsten Raymonde’s observation that “the more you remember, the more you’ve lost” gives a concise form to one of the book’s central post-collapse tensions: memory preserves a vanished world, but also makes its absence more sharply felt. Kirsten speaks from the opposite position to those who remember the pre-collapse era clearly. Her childhood memories are sparse, and she wonders whether that very incompleteness has softened her experience of the world that followed.

The Thought in Context

Kirsten develops the idea during an interview with François Diallo, a librarian who also publishes a newspaper in New Petoskey. In explaining her limited memories, she first notes that children seemed traumatized when the Georgia Flu struck, but argues that time changes how the loss is borne. She was eight, or perhaps nine, when she and her brother stopped walking; she cannot remember the year they spent on the road, and thinks this may mean she cannot remember the worst of it. Her claim is not that children escaped trauma, but that the distance of time and the limits of childhood memory could shape what remained.

From there, Kirsten turns to people living in the post-flu world who struggle most with it. She proposes that those who remember the old world clearly may have the hardest time adapting, because the remembered past continually measures the present against what has disappeared. The maxim condenses that contrast into a reciprocal relation: memory is a possession, but also evidence of loss.

Kirsten’s Fragmentary Memory

Kirsten’s own account gives the observation its particular weight. She cannot remember the television show in which she acted as a child, or much of her life before the collapse; what she knows about leaving Toronto with her brother comes from what he told her. She has been with the Travelling Symphony since she was fourteen, but the year on the road before she and her brother settled remains inaccessible to her. The gaps are not merely omissions in an otherwise complete recollection: they shape what she can say about the catastrophe and how she understands her survival.

What remains from before the collapse feels dreamlike to her. Among the few images she can summon is a view of New York City from an airplane window, remembered from the last year or two of the old world. The concrete image survives, while much of the life around it does not. That unevenness makes her maxim more than a general statement about nostalgia: it arises from a mind in which a few vivid fragments stand beside broad stretches of silence.

Publication and Witness

Diallo prints the interview in the third issue of the New Petoskey newspaper, filling its back page during a slow news month. The paper also carries local announcements and barter notices, placing Kirsten’s reflection within the practical record of a community rebuilding forms of public life. The newspapers pass hand to hand around the airport for four days and are the first new papers its residents have seen since the collapse. In this setting, the interview turns an individual account of memory into something that can be circulated and read by others.

For Clark Thompson, the newspaper’s interview carries a separate shock: Kirsten is someone who knew Arthur Leander and witnessed his death onstage. Clark rereads the interview after the papers return to the museum. The encounter underscores how recollections of the old world can reach people who did not share the same experience, through testimony preserved in print. Kirsten’s maxim describes the burden of remembering, while the newspaper gives those memories a fragile means of surviving beyond the person who first carried them.

Memory, Loss, and the Remains of the Past

The book places Kirsten’s incomplete recollections beside other ways the past endures. In a comic-book scene, Clark recognizes a dinner party from his own life: figures and details on the page recall a gathering in Los Angeles, including Elizabeth Colton and Arthur, while Miranda is absent from the comic’s version. The scene shows memory returning through an altered representation rather than as a complete record. Like Kirsten’s recollections, it preserves particular people and images while leaving gaps.

The maxim therefore holds two truths together without resolving them. Remembering can intensify grief for what has vanished, but fragments of memory, printed interviews, and transformed scenes also keep parts of that world available to others. Kirsten’s words give loss a measure; the surrounding narrative shows that what is remembered may be partial, mediated, and still consequential.