The Tragedy of Human Memory

How lost is the most valuable thing

How much do you remember what you did this year?

Or rather, how much do you remember what you did for your whole life?

All these memories, they come in fragments, small shards of glass from a broken window during winter. You can only catch a glimpse of whatever happened, through a frosty, blurred imagery, with the mind filling in whatever details you can’t recall — a feeble attempt at sharpening the image, no matter how hard you try.

Human memory fails us, as it almost usually does. The brain is not used for remembering, that’s what notebooks are for. The brain is actually used and optimized for thinking, making decisions, swimming in its own imagination when coming up with ideas. It’s not a hard drive, like how we so erroneously describe it most of the time. It’s a processor.

It fills me with so much sorrow at times when I know I experienced some overwhelming emotion that was so visceral, so enveloping — be it elation, anger, or sadness — but I just can’t draw back that experience to be felt again, right in the bones.

Everything seem to be dragged into oblivion, into the quotidian humdrum of our existence, washed and eroded into indifference, as if nothing really happened.

Just like how Evan Puschak mentioned in his most recent video, elaborating on Bon Iver’s song, Holocene:

I think [this song] hits so hard because the truth is that memories are a mood. The mind is made up of language but it’s not always, or even usually, lucid language. Mostly, it’s a vast reservoir of gibberish — here and there a concrete image leaps to the front, a moment, seemingly at random. Maybe it happened, maybe not exactly that way.

The amazing freedom felt when travelling, with days filled with smiles; That night when I really talked to Mom. And I cried, and she cried; The panic attack that hit me when I was in final year of Junior College;

The time when she broke my heart.

They all seem so faraway, so distant, that I seem to be grabbing wisps of dust when I try to remember them. Not all of them are good memories, but feeling them is what made me feel alive, real, human.

Even as we take snapshots of so many of our memories, offloading it to photographs and even videos, it is impossible for us to relive it in its truest, most unadulterated splendor.

But maybe memories are not meant to be relived, reminisced, as tempting as it is to do so, and get trapped in it, even. Maybe memories are fragments because they’re just little baits, the carrots in front of us, to make us continue searching for whatever we want to experience again, or something we’ve never experience before.

To spur us to be alive once more. And once more. And once more.

As M. John Harrison so eloquently puts it:

“Memory commits you to the nuance; the fog. If you act on memory you commit yourself on the basis of echoes: unpredictable, faint, fading even as they were generated. No basis on which to inch out across your life, and yet all you have.”

Even as memories are fleeting, fallible, and flawed, that doesn’t mean they are worthless.

Instead, they are all we have. One of the most valuable things we have. Living and breathing only when we live and breathe.

Even as Anne Frank left for hiding, she wrote in her diary:

“Preoccupied by the thought of going into hiding, I stuck the craziest things in the bag, but I’m not sorry.”

“Memories mean more to me than dresses.”

This article was originally posted on Medium, 29 August 2016.