In Defence/Defense of My Memory

It seems that I could still rely on my memory to a large extent, as is proven by the following:

"At that time the Magdalena river interested me more than the glories of the central characters. I began to know it as a child, traveling from the Carribean coast, where I had the good fortune to be born, to the distant, fogbound city of Bogots, where, from my first visit, I felt more of an outsider than in any other city in the world. As a student I sailed the river eleven times in both directions, traveling on steamboats that came out of the shipyards of the Mississippi already condemned to nostalgia and possessed of a mythic call that no writer could resist."