I am 19 years old. For the majority of my 19 years of existence, I have been collecting memories. These memories aren’t of the essential kind though. Instead, they parralell survival memories such as “hot things burn you”. These memories are collected purely for posterity. They are little pieces of information about people, events, and myself that I have been carefully storing for later. As to why I have deemed some things more worthy of rememberance than others is unknown to me. The process is subjective, and subconcious.
Recently, I have been considering what it is to remember something. For me, a memory isn’t like a picture. It’s literally a place. Like my bed. Like the seat in my first period english class. In reality, it doesnt exist. However, in my head it exists because I have been there. While it may not literally exist because another person could never visit the same place, it exists in my head because I can visit that place anytime I want. Remembering for me isn’t just recalling things. I can leave wherever I am and visit these places. Sometimes I am reminded of something and instead of leaving, I am taken.
Few of my favorite memories involve just me. Frequently there are other people in these memories. An incarnation of that person lives in that ‘place’. So while this is an event that happened, it really only happened in my mind. Because on the other side of the coin, there is another person who is creating an entirely different place in their head in which they can return. Or perhaps they’re not. Something you decide is important enough to tuck away may be just another segment of monotony for that other person. Or perhaps they’re missing critical elements of the place because of intoxication, or distraction. Being high can certainly take the very couch you were sitting on 20 minutes ago and turn it into a very different place. In esscence, it turns it into a different place.
Any event that’s ever happened to you involving another person has happened twice. Once to you. Once to that other person. Conversely, it’s never happened at all. Because the other person wasn’t in the same place you were. It’s this dichotomy that helps make things like history, witnesses, testimonials, and even recollections of your life particularly frivolous.
The conclusion that I’ve drawn from all of this is that any memory you might have is a solitary creation. You’re the only person that’s ever been to that place, and while their may have been others there with you, they only exist in the sense that you’ve created liknesses of them in your mind.
All this thinking has lead me to one specific point: I’ve started to feel that it’s particularly selfish to remember. Why is it that this very instant is so important to remember? It’s one thing to live in the moment, it’s quite another to save something for the expressed purpose of returning to it later. This is the part I find the most selfish. Instead of remembering something because it had such a profound effect on your life, one starts archiving things to later feed to an ever hungry sense of nostalgia. Something that seems to be an ever increasing problem as one ages. Remembering things in this manner means that you’re expecting to be unhappy at some point. Nostalgia expressly exists for the purpose of recalling a better time. I hope to never be unhappy in that fashion. However I find myself acting selfishly every day. This very site exists for the expressed purpose of being selfish.
Even more problematic than creating ‘nostalgia fodder’ is saving memories you weren’t happy with. The mind is a fantastic machine, and very easily, the line between memory and invention can suddenly become blurred. While your place may exist, nothing stops you from changing it to something you’d have rather happened. Or, constantly changing it to something different, and optimal. This then corrupts a place you have been with a place you’d have rather been. If it changes the smallest thing, the most important part has been lost: the details.
(Writing this particularly upset me)
Josh