Memories have a way of colonising our conscious- ness regardless of place and time. Brought out from the closets of the mind, they are laundered, refurbished and returned.
Not all memories are precious, as there is much one regrets and there is much one would rather not think of, but all these are rarely deleted.
Memory too frail is overpowered in the end by forgetfulness and with each recall, memories undergo a reconstruct, a rehash, a re-edit.
Guy P. Harrison, an American writer, says: “Memory edits for impact, efficiency, clarity and functionality.” It tells us what you should remember. It fills in the tale sometimes with wistful detail regardless of accuracy, it uses its scalpel to shear the unpleasant and the unflattering experiences to spare us pain and humiliation.
Many things are lost in transit. Those halcyon days we remember were perhaps not so happy after all and sometimes we also dwell on the hurt and pain so firmly cast on our memory. Memory is packaged information to help us deal with the present and plan for the future. In the memorable words of Salman Rushdie in his The Midnight’s Children, “Memory selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimises, glorifies, and vilifies also but it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own.” It is also the vagary of memory that we remember random events for no explicable reason whatsoever except that they come to us unbidden in chance moments.
It is the recounting of memories turning the past to the present that makes life. English author Aldous Huxley says, “Every man’s memory is his private literature.” Memories are triggered by nostalgia, loneliness and longing and are powerful emotions
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