What we call memory in everyday life is memory given spatial form. Proust keeps summoning the village, roads, houses, and rooms of his childhood in In Search of Lost Time because remembrance compresses certain stretches of time into something like a honeycomb of space. As Bachelard says in The Poetics of Space, “What makes remembrance vivid is not time but space. We discover the beautiful fossils of duration made concrete through long dwelling, through space, and within space.”
Come to think of it, when I sift through memories one by one, time, the people there, what I thought or felt, expressions and mood, all of that is hazy, but space stays sharp. Maybe “space” is a bigger deal to us than we usually treat it as. I wonder why our sense of space is so clear.