Or do we? Is memory more like an etching in stone, or more like an imprint in the sand on the beach.
I can pretty fairly say that mine is falls into the latter category. Nothing of the past will ever seem quite like it was, or quite like it will seem in the future.
Nostalgia is perhaps the best example. I caught myself today remarking on how much I missed senior year of high school. Which may well be true, but what I really miss is my memory of those times. And that memory is a far cry frome reality. Of course, going back through my journal, I can tell for certain that a good part of my senior year was just as miserable and confused as anything I've dealt with lately.
Yet even written archives are confusing. I was reading back over some of the 191MB of archived e-mails I have, and I saw some pretty astonishing things. I found records of arguments and even fights which I scarcely remember, and am quite at a loss to explain. Some things which were no doubt very upsetting or unsettling at the time now look positively trivial. Despite the records however, I remember that the events at the time seemed quite important, and quite consequential. Written memories it seems are not quite a representation of reality either.
Part of the problem stems from language. Whether written or spoken, language is not adequate for the expression of all aspects of reality. There are feelings which simply cannot be summarized by words. Or pictures. Or sounds. For that matter, there are so many little contributing factors to any given state of mind, that replicating it, be it through language or memory, is a task night impossible.
But what's most distressing about memory for me is the implications regarding history. "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it," I like to repeat. And truly, I think I'm not the only one. But how, tell me, how can one learn from history, when one can never get an accurate representation of it. How can one learn from one's mistakes, when one is never quite sure of exactly how one arrived at them? When one cannot even remember what steps led to them? How can we learn from an inaccurate, and ever-changing chronicale of our past?
I remember at the beginning of this year, I was very hopeful. Come what may, it seemed, life could be just as good as one was willing to try to make it. Looking back on that sentiment, I feel rather sheepish. How could I have been so blind? So stupid? Yet I know the feeling was sincere, was rooted somewhere, was not merely the utterance of one totally divorced from reality.
It is a pleasant truism to say that sometimes one learns best the hard way. But I wonder whether we learn at all. Whether, rather, we do not simply shape our memory of events to fit some mold of reality. Whether, what we learn is what we choose to believe is the lesson. And if so, will we truly see the causes of our failures, and our successes.
1984 rather unsettlingly codified in print the idea of the mutability of the past. But the key to the brainwashing of 1984 was that people were conditioned eventually to truly believe what they were told. This may not be as far-fetched as I thought originally. Perhaps, they are only making explicit what we have practiced privately from the dawn of time. Perhaps he who controls the present controls both the past and the future. Truly a comforting thought.
