People can remember places vividly while forgetting the events that occurred in them

Evidence

The remarkable thing was not that the face should be visible here, nor that I had once seen a face in the sea in the mid-70s, the remarkable thing was that I had forgotten it and now remembered. Apart from one or two isolated events that Yngve and I had talked about so often they had almost assumed biblical proportions, I remembered hardly anything from my childhood. That is, I remembered hardly any of the events in it. But I did remember the rooms where they took place. I could remember all the places I had been, all the rooms I had been in. Just not what happened there. — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 1085

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to memory research on spatial versus episodic memory encoding, and to Proust’s involuntary memory concerning atmosphere rather than event. — connects to: Adventures are remembered as dreamlike and as happening to someone else — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 465; Living memory of expulsion decays and must be replaced by institutional commemoration — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 957; Embodied memory and felt landmarks constitute a profound knowing of place — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 40 (+1 more)
• SEED: Could seed an essay on how place memory differs from event memory in life writing and memoir practice.