The gift and curse of memory
“If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.”
This is how Fanny Price, the heroine of Mansfield Park, talks on the faculty of the human memory in one of the most famed quotes of this lesser-known Jane Austin’s masterpiece. And she is right. There is something in the context of this intelligence – something that transcends the biological wiring that is inherited from one generation to the next – that characterises us as a species.
On the one hand, our memory creates an illusion of immortality as it connects us to the events of the past, reinforcing feelings linked to the occasional motherland, philosophy, and culture. Our history interweaves into the collective consciousness or subconsciousness, blurring away the boundaries of the unknown obscurity from which we are born and into which we perish. We exist because of our memory and the memory of our ancestors, and everything great we have achieved has been based on the stepping stones that this evolution has brought forth. Every single action of ours is thus meaningful, and we can live forever in the reverberation created by our temporary presence on Earth.
On the other hand, our inability to forget makes forgiving so hard that religious philosophies had to step in and introduce forgiveness as an essential quality of any virtuous person. The fact that our memories are distorted by time, individual perspectives, or even selfish agendas makes it even harder for our weak and fragile nature to find the strength to move forward without carrying the weights of the past.
Based on the above and echoing Kazuo Ishiguro in his Buried Giant as well, one wonders how, we, as humans, can erase traumatic events from our collective memory without losing our individual identity, or even our human quality. Still, as we navigate through all those moments that build up our existence, it is worth remembering that, ultimately, the choice of who we become lies within as lies our power to create memories we are proud to revere for the years to come.
Photo credits: © Konstantina Sakellariou
