The Magic of Memory

Oh lift me from the grass! 

I die! I faint! I fail! 

Let thy love in kisses rain 

On my lips and eyelids pale. 

- from Lines to an Indian Air by Percy Blythe Shelley

Saturday is my day to be alone, to just sit back at a cafe and reflect in words--which becomes my blog article for the week. Writing is a way of processing thoughts. I write to think. And I also adhere to the principle that, "if you did not write it down, it didn't happen". 

The internet has now become the human civilisation's collective memory. This blog could well turn out to be the only trace of my existence on this place, when I'm no longer around. Not that it is that important to leave a so-called legacy behind. Existence is much bigger than what we leave behind during our short stint on this tiny planet called Earth, third from an insignificant star, which we call the Sun.

It is interesting that Socrates was very much against the written word. Knowledge and virtue to him is not something static like words on paper. Things written down cannot answer back and is prone to misinterpretation. Socrates believed in the dialectic method--the constant questioning and reexamining of one's statements and thoughts. A a virtuous person is one who lives that. 

Ironically, we owe this knowledge to Socrates's student Plato, who, thankfully did not follow his mentor's belief and wrote down all of his teachings for posterity. But we still need to give some thought to Socrates's argument that memory is not something passive but an active process of learning. When you remember something, it is internalised and it becomes a part of you. You can't claim that when all you have are books in your personal library. You have to at least assimilate what you learn into your thinking process.

Things that you remember are what you'll bring up in any ad-hoc conversation with friends. Even when you write, you are also channelling and modifying sentence patterns that you've encountered before and internalised. When something is remembered, you can be assured that your brain has changed. 

Having said that, it is also worth mentioning that remembering alone does not in itself constitutes wisdom or even knowledge. Simple regurgitation of facts only makes you an efficient database. Wisdom, as I argued in a recent blog article is like a trained AI model. Facts and anecdotes are just the icing on the cake. To recall them, you need the necessary hooks and connections in the brain honed through regular thinking and introspection. 

I can recall fragments of poems by Shelly, Byron and Wordsworth and that enriches my life tremendously. "I die!, I faint!, I fall!". I was surprised when my father suddenly uttered this line during those difficult days when he was suffering from the neuro-degenerating effects of Parkinson's disease. I had casually asked him about his school days and that triggered his memory of an English teacher who had drilled them on those beautiful lyrical poems found in Palgrave's famous Golden Treasury anthology. That was a magical moment for me--in a flash my dad and I were one, sharing an inseparable bond.

Music triggers recollections too. I can always feel the morning sunshine when I was sitting in the garden outside my childhood home, whenever I hear strains of Mozart's piano sonata in C minor, K457 because my neighbour's daughter was practising that piece constantly for her ABRSM exam. 

The replicants in the movie Blade Runner clung to their implanted memories as a kind of prove that they are real. And in the famous death scene, Rutger Hauer's character, Roy Batty lamented how all his memories will be lost, "like tears in the rain". 

Things we remember constitute a great part of who we are. When memories are recollected, we bring back the essence of the very moment--the smell, the sights and the sound of the experience; and that I think is what life, or at least a great part of what Socrates's examined life, is all about.