The Imperfection of Memory
Wed, Jul 15th 2009, 08:40
I’m thirty four next month. I don’t know if I’ve somehow invisibly moved into a subtly different phase or time in my life but I notice that I’ve become occasionally preoccupied by memory and its imperfections.
I don’t know if it’s something particular to men rather than women, but I seem to have forgotten all kinds of things about my own life. Sometimes my wife will remind me of a place or a person and I will barely recall the situation if at all. In my twenties I used to think about my school days a lot. Now I hardly think about them. Some memories, particularly the most exciting and adventurous ones – like the times I travelled for months through Eastern Europe and then later to Australia and New Zealand – they can seem as though they happened to another person; like something I saw in a film.
I don’t keep a diary. The nearest thing to it is this blog. There doesn’t seem much point as most days would be fairly banal and much like all other days from a ‘what I did point of view’. Perhaps ‘what I felt’ might be more interesting, but still, there wouldn’t be so much variation on the micro day to day, week to week level.
I have very occasionally kept a diary – usually when I’ve been travelling – and that only serves to demonstrate the unreliability of memory. There are incidents and meetings recorded in there which make me go, ‘how could I have forgotten that!’
Arguably the fact that once reminded I do remember them means that my memory hasn’t so much lost the information as forgotten where to find it. But without the diary to locate it, what other great incidents from my life have been lost in the library of my brain?
I suspect the fact that we lose or misplace our memories, or that they fade in detail like an old picture must be a natural mechanism. If I remembered everything about my past in livid detail I suppose it might start to overwhelm the here and now. Embarrassing moments would forever be just as embarrassing to remember as they were to live through. But equally, joyous moments are always slightly fading away too.
What I hope and suspect is that the subconscious hangs on to all this material in some way. Perhaps it makes me aware of who I am without having to refer to every remembered, or half-remembered, or stored-but-forgotten detail?
I suppose what worries me is that losing a memory is almost like losing a part of your life. It’s a kind of death. If you don’t remember something, then it’s almost like it never happened. A part of living is lost and through that process a part of you dies. Combined with a heightened awareness of mortality with aging parents and grandparents it creates a rather unsettling phenomenon.
I also wonder if memory malfunction is something to do with activity. In my twenties I had a lot less life to remember and probably had a lot more time to think about old times and reassess them. In that way, I was constantly warming up old memories. With an ever increasing (internal) pressure to “achieve” something as many 30 and 40 something’s feel, I perhaps live a lot more in the here and now, and actually quite a lot in the what-might-be, that I don’t think about the past as much.
This is turn makes me wonder if this ambition and busyness causes a narrowing of viewpoint, expectations, imagination and indeed personality. Or is it vital to choose a single point and head towards it to achieve something, even if the cost is your own memory and personal foundation? It doesn’t sound like a good thing now I come to write it. Though perhaps I'm being a little dramatic. I do that from time to time.
My wife works with students, and while they can often be frustrating for their lack of commitment, she says they can be energising because of their openness, hopefulness and belief in themselves.
This morning, while I was waking up, my subconscious was trying to remind me of the time when my brain ‘felt’ like that.
It wasn’t so much a memory of an event, as a memory of being; a memory of how it feels to have so much possibility ahead of you. I hope that’s a memory I never lose.
