Memory
I am more attentive now to the way a person emerges from the words she speaks, how people think of each other as fictions, how stories change the way we think of people we love, how our deceptive memories shape our lives.
Our memories deceive us, there is no dispute there. Ask scientists, ask children, ask writers. Everyone knows they can’t know.
But is there anything to remember?
When I experience this moment with all my senses, I am most certainly always missing something. Maybe then, it is not a question of our ability accurately recall a moment, but our fundamental inability to fully experience anything at all.
There’s a Russian saying about nostalgia: “The past is more unpredictable than the future.”
It’s so common for people’s memories about a time to become disconnected from how they actually felt at the time.
When thinking about our own lives, we don’t remember how we actually felt in the past; We remember how we think we should have felt, given what we
... See moreJust as most of what happens to us dissolves, becomes part of an inner compost known in generalized terms—“my high school years,” “boot camp,” and so on—so most of what we have read loses definition and becomes a blurry wash.
Sven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
- “The duration of felt experience is between two and three seconds …. Everything before belongs to memory; everything after is anticipation. It’s a strange, barely fathomable fact that our lives are lived through this small, moving window.”
The New Yorker • Being in Time
Our memories deceive us, there is no dispute there. Ask scientists, ask children, ask writers. Everyone knows they can’t know.
But is there anything to remember?
When I experience this moment with all my senses, I am most certainly always missing something. Maybe then, it is not a question of our ability accurately recall a moment, but our fundament
... See moreif everyone remembered everything, would our differences get shaved away? What would happen to our sense of self? It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn’t be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film.
Ted Chiang • Exhalation: Stories
Cognition is how we make sense of the world. As you may have noticed, we don’t all see the world the same way. As a child, were you as equally obsessed as I was with knowing if we all saw the same green? How can we know?
T. L. Uglow • A Curiosity of Doubts: Penguin Special
Yes! And it felt like there was no way to explain what I was asking. Do you see the same red as I see? By definition, red is red, but that wasn’t what I was asking. I was asking if our souls swapped places and escaped the contextless silos of our individual experiences, what I would see through your eyes?
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