Thursday, 29 October 2020

A Note on the Value of Memory.

My faculty of memory has taken an odd turn lately. I’ve started seeing memory as a kind of falsehood because none of my life ever happened. It’s as though all the people, all the events, all the feelings, all the pleasures and all the pains were but still photographs past which my consciousness was ever moving at a regular speed, observing and responding as though I were a part of them. And yet still I like to let them run through my mind’s eye like stop motion animations while being unable to know whether they were real or not.

Conversely, I’m becoming irritated when I read of somebody famous having died, and the news report always follows the fundamental fact with a list of mini obituaries dutifully written by other famous people who claim to remember them with fondness. I find obituaries pointless, you see. I struggle to know what value there is in casting plaudits at somebody who can no longer hear them.

No comments: