The Nature of Memory

Working with one of my memoir writers recently we found she was having trouble with the chronology of her life story, and she began to bemoan the loss of her diaries. She had, she said, destroyed several of her diaries in a fit of boredom. She’d looked at them, declared there was nothing interesting inside those covers embellished with roses and lilies of the valley, or with spring flowers, and had thrown them out. Then she recalled that she’d stored some other diaries at her grandmother’s house, and wondered how she could get her cousins to dig through the boxes in the attic and mail her journals on to her. Which boxes were they in? She thought she knew. It became a bit of an obsession with her.

It would have been difficult to persuade her of what I suspected the truth would be – even if she found her journals again they would be of almost no use to her. That’s a bold statement, because I cannot know what was on the pages, and yet I wouldn’t mind betting that what she was searching for was not words about events, but the physical reassurance that a period of time from which she could recall so little had, in fact, occurred. If there had been anything dramatic and worthy of memory from those days she would almost certainly have remembered it. It was the big gaps in her early twenties that bewildered her. Could she really recall nothing at all from 1988? Christmas? Vacations? All gone.

Her obsession stemmed from the shock, which we all have, that stretches of time have come and gone and we have no records, none, and only the haziest of memories. The features of loved ones fade, and we barely recall what those features were. We are at war with our fleeting memories, and they are evaporating faster than we can cope with.

If memoir can teach us something, and I believe it can, then one of the first lessons would be to treasure the passing moment because it is passing so fast. Be here now, said Ram Dass, and he meant it. Every moment has its roots in the past, of course, which is what gives it its sweetness, but life has to be lived moment by moment, and feeling the present while being alert to the past is the best way to be fully here, now.