memory
I always think of memories as something that happens TO me, they flit through and around my mind, and I am a passive receiver. The early Christian monks’ conception of memory as as active process and tool is interesting.
Because Narrative is both a technology for remembering AND for forgetting (for revealing and hiding), narratives spark desire for discovery.
Thought is where we recognize what we’ve perceived, and begin to attach significance to that thing.
Narrative and character arise because we attached meaning to what we recognize.
This is memory’s task of retrospection, to integrate the knowledge that we have, to impute a sense of cause and effect to the events in our lives, and to offer a sense of meaning.
Abby Smith Rumsey • When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future
Memory begins to qualify the imagination, to give it another formation, one that is peculiar to the self. … If I were to remember other things, I should be someone else. —N. SCOTT MOMADAY
Suzanne Paola • Tell It Slant, Second Edition
Our sense of who we are depends, in significant part, on our memories. And yet they’re not to be trusted. ‘What is selected as a personal memory,’ writes Professor of psychology and neuroscience Giuliana Mazzoni, ‘needs to fit the current idea that we have of ourselves.’
Will Storr • The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human, and How to Tell Them Better
Social remembering: Our own recollection is tied to others with whom we have shared our life.
L. M. Sacasas • The Stuff of Life: Materiality and the Self
The answers to the biggest questions we have about identity, story, and God can only be answered in relation to memory. Without memory, we are forced to rely solely on ideas and suggestions to make sense of who we are, as opposed to the concrete.
Cole Arthur Riley • This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
And this story must cross some threshold of coherence. I must be able to produce an integration that informs me of who I am, giving me continuity over time.
Andrew Root • The Congregation in a Secular Age (Ministry in a Secular Age Book #3): Keeping Sacred Time against the Speed of Modern Life
Ideas related to this collection