Recall Old Memories Quotes

The past does not haunt us. We haunt the past. We allow our minds to focus in that direction. We open memories and examine them. We reexperience emotions we felt during the painful events we experienced because we are recalling them in as much detail as we can.

One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation.

You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn’t realize we lived in that web of magic, connected by silver filaments of chance and circumstance. But I knew it all along. When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present and into the future. You probably did too; you just don’t recall it. See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves. After you go so far away from it, though, you can’t really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they’re left feeling a little heartsad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm. That’s what I believe. The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It’s not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don’t know it’s happening until one day you feel you’ve lost something but you’re not sure what it is. It’s like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you “sir.” It just happens. These memories of who I was and where I lived are important to me. They make up a large part of who I’m going to be when my journey winds down. I need the memory of magic if I am ever going to conjure magic again. I need to know and remember, and I want to tell you.

So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.

When love dies and marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It's the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation. So, against that headwind of forgetfulness I want to place my little candle of truth and see how far it throws its light.

The problem is not that we forget the past. It is that we recall it too well. Children recall wrongs that enemies did to their grandfathers, and blame the granddaughters of the old enemies. Children are not born with memories of those who insulted their mother or slew their grandfather or stole their land. Those hates are bequeathed to them, taught them, breathed into them. If adults didn't tell their children of their hereditary hates, perhaps we would do better.

I do need that time, though, for Naoko's face to appear. And as the years have passed, the time has grown longer. The sad truth is that what I could recall in five seconds all too needed ten, then thirty, then a full minute-like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness. There is no way around it: my memory is growing ever more distant from the spot where Naoko used to stand-ever more distant from the spot where my old self used to stand. And nothing but scenery, that view of the meadow in October, returns again and again to me like a symbolic scene in a movie. Each time is appears, it delivers a kick to some part of my mind. "Wake up," it says. "I'm still here. Wake up and think about it. Think about why I'm still here." The kicking never hurts me. There's no pain at all. Just a hollow sound that echoes with each kick. And even that is bound to fade one day. At the Hamburg airport, though, the kicks were longer and harder than usual. Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.

This was a memory I wanted to keep, whole, and recall again and again. When I was fifty years old I wanted to remember this moment on the porch, holding hands with Cameron while he shared himself with me. I didn’t want it to be something on the fringes of my memory like so many other things about Cameron and myself.

When love dies and a marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It's the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation.

memories were tricky things…they weren’t stable. they changed with perception over time. …they shifted, and [she] understood how the passage of time affected them. the hard working striver might recall his childhood as one filled with misery and hardship marred by the cat calls and mae calling of playground bullies, but later, have a much more forgiving understanding of past injustices. the handmade clothes he had been forced to wear, became a testament to his mother’s love. each patch and stitch a sign of her diligence, instead of a brand of poverty. he would remember father staying up late to help him with his homework – the old old man’s patience and dedication, instead of the sharpness of his temper when he returned home – late- from the factory. it went the other way as well. [she] had scanned thousands of memories of spurned women, whose handsome lovers turned ugly and rude. roman noses, perhaps too pointed. eyes growing small and mean. while the oridnary looking boys who had become their husbands, grew in attractiveness as the years passed, so that when asked if it was love at first site, the women cheerfully answered yes. memories were moving pictures in which meaning was constantly in flux. they were stories people told themselves.

That wasn’t a true dream, but an ancient organic memory millions of years old. The innate releasing mechanisms laid down in your cytoplasm have been awakened. The expanding sun and rising temperatures are driving you back down to the spinal levels into the drowned seas of the lowest layers of your unconscious, into the entirely new zone of the neuronic psyche. This is the lumbar transfer, total psychic recall. We really remember these swamps and lagoons.

Recalling those gone times, old memories lit by the fire of the new, I did not this time wonder how long it would last; I was too smart for that now. Take what you get, and don't think. Of course it could never be that easy, but there were moments, like now, that I could successfully pretend that it was, and I had no inclination to try to peer past those moments. I'm not one who wants to know the future: at the best it spoils the present, with longing or dismay, and at the worst, well. Who really wants to find out how tight the sling is, for your own very personal ass, who wants to know how deep the shit will really be. Not you. Not me either. Because it's rarely bliss saved up, is it, when you finally get there. I'll take my now, waking with a lover's scent on me, around me, take my hopes before they're maybe tragedy; a good morning is a good morning, even if it leads to apocalypse at night.

After all, much of the fondness avid readers, and certainly collectors, have for their books is related to the books' physical bodies. As much as they are vessels for stories (and poetry, reference information, etc.), books are historical artifacts and repositories for memories-we like to recall who gave books to us, where we were when we read them, how old we were, and so on.

Most Humans lose access to old memories as they acquire new ones. They know how to speak, for instance, but they don’t recall learning to speak. They keep what experience has taught them—usually—but lose the experience itself. We

I’ve long suspected that many of my memories of childhood are actually drawn from old pictures, that they are a composite of snapshots, a mosaic of celluloid images reworked into a remembered reality. Kodak cast backward. Maybe it’s better to recall the past that way. We rarely take pictures of sad occasions.

Old age breeds the miracle of recall. You have no short-term memory atall; you can’t remember what you did minutes ago, but you can recall with exquisite clarity what you did on your fifth birthday and how it all felt.

Now here is an oddity. A question for the zombie philosophers. What does it mean that my past is a fog but my present is brilliant, bursting with sound and color? Since I became Dead I've recorded new memories with the fidelity of an old cassette deck, faint and muffled and ultimately forgettable. But I can recall every hour of the last few days in vivid detail, and the thought of losing a single one horrifies me. Where am I getting this focus? This clarity? I can trace a solid line from the moment I met Julie all the way to now, lying next to her in this sepulchral bedroom, and despite the millions of past moments I've lost or tossed away like highway trash, I know with a lockjawed certainty I'll remember this one for the rest of my life.

She knew from listening to her grandmother that old age was made up of such remembrances of youth. But she didn’t want to recall things. She wanted to live things—or as a compromise, re-live rather than reminisce. She decided to fix this time in her life exactly the way it was this instant. Perhaps that way she could hold on to it as a living thing and not have it become something called a memory.

Despite your best efforts and intentions, there's a limited reservoir to fellowship before you begin to rely solely on the vapors of nostalgia. Eventually, you move on, latch on to another group of friends. Once in a while, though, you remember something, a remark or a gesture, and it takes you back. You think how close all of you were, the laughs and commiserations, the fondness and affection and support. You recall the parties, the trips, the dinners and late, late nights. Even the arguments and small betrayals have a revisionist charm in retrospect. You're astonished and enlivened by the memories. You wonder why and how it ever stopped. You have the urge to pick up the phone, fire off an email, suggesting reunion, resumption, and you start to act, but then don't, because it would be awkward talking after such a long lag, and, really, what would be the point? Your lives are different now. Whatever was there before is gone. And it saddens you, it makes you feel old and vanquished--not only over this group that disbanded, but also over all the others before and after it, the friends you had in grade and high school, in college, in your twenties and thirties, your kinship to them (never mind to all your old lovers) ephemeral and, quite possibly, illusory to begin with.

Men always praise antiquity and fault the present, although not always reasonably, and they are partisans of things past such that not only do they celebrate those ages that they know from what historians have preserved of them, but also those that as old men they recall having seen in their youth. And if this opinion of theirs is false, as it is most of the time, I am persuaded that there are various causes that lead them into this deception.

Those faces on Main Street shaded by wide straw hats are surrounded in my child-memory by hardware and ploughs, seed bags and bales of cotton, the smell of guano and mule lots, hot sun on sidewalks and lovely white ladies with sweet childlike voices and smooth childlike faces, and Old gardens of boxwood and camellias, and fields endlessly curving around my small world. I know now that the bitterness, the cruel sensual lips, the quick fears in hard eyes, the sashshaying buttocks of brown girls, the thin childish voices of white women, had a great deal to do with high interest at the bank and low wages in the mills and gullied fields and lynchings and Ku Klux Klan and segregation and sacred womanhood and revivals, and Prohibition. And that no part of this memory can be understood without recalling it all of it.

Pettiness often leads both to error and to the digging of a trap for oneself. Wondering (which I am sure he didn't) 'if by the 1990s [Hitchens] was morphing into someone I didn’t quite recognize”, Blumenthal recalls with horror the night that I 'gave' a farewell party for Martin Walker of the Guardian, and then didn't attend it because I wanted to be on television instead. This is easy: Martin had asked to use the fine lobby of my building for a farewell bash, and I'd set it up. People have quite often asked me to do that. My wife did the honors after Nightline told me that I’d have to come to New York if I wanted to abuse Mother Teresa and Princess Diana on the same show. Of all the people I know, Martin Walker and Sidney Blumenthal would have been the top two in recognizing that journalism and argument come first, and that there can be no hard feelings about it. How do I know this? Well, I have known Martin since Oxford. (He produced a book on Clinton, published in America as 'The President We Deserve'. He reprinted it in London, under the title, 'The President They Deserve'. I doffed my hat to that.) While Sidney—I can barely believe I am telling you this—once also solicited an invitation to hold his book party at my home. A few days later he called me back, to tell me that Martin Peretz, owner of the New Republic, had insisted on giving the party instead. I said, fine, no bones broken; no caterers ordered as yet. 'I don't think you quite get it,' he went on, after an honorable pause. 'That means you can't come to the party at all.' I knew that about my old foe Peretz: I didn't then know I knew it about Blumenthal. I also thought that it was just within the limit of the rules. I ask you to believe that I had buried this memory until this book came out, but also to believe that I won't be slandered and won't refrain—if motives or conduct are in question—from speculating about them in my turn.

the cruel forgetfulness of old age, when the most ancient of memories stand out with agonizingly clear precision and the nearest of incidents are lost beyond recall. With

In the jumbled, fragmented memories I carry from my childhood there are probably nearly as many dreams as images from waking life. I thought of one which might have been my earliest remembered nightmare. I was probably about four years old - I don't think I'd started school yet - when I woke up screaming. The image I retained of the dream, the thing which had frightened me so, was an ugly, clown-like doll made of soft red and cream-coloured rubber. When you squeezed it, bulbous eyes popped out on stalks and the mouth opened in a gaping scream. As I recall it now, it was disturbingly ugly, not really an appropriate toy for a very young child, but it had been mine when I was younger, at least until I'd bitten its nose off, at which point it had been taken away from me. At the time when I had the dream I hadn't seen it for a year or more - I don't think I consciously remembered it until its sudden looming appearance in a dream had frightened me awake. When I told my mother about the dream, she was puzzled. 'But what's scary about that? You were never scared of that doll.' I shook my head, meaning that the doll I'd owned - and barely remembered - had never scared me. 'But it was very scary,' I said, meaning that the reappearance of it in my dream had been terrifying. My mother looked at me, baffled. 'But it's not scary,' she said gently. I'm sure she was trying to make me feel better, and thought this reasonable statement would help. She was absolutely amazed when it had the opposite result, and I burst into tears. Of course she had no idea why, and of course I couldn't explain. Now I think - and of course I could be wrong - that what upset me was that I'd just realized that my mother and I were separate people. We didn't share the same dreams or nightmares. I was alone in the universe, like everybody else. In some confused way, that was what the doll had been telling me. Once it had loved me enough to let me eat its nose; now it would make me wake up screaming. ("My Death")

Memories separated in time are often recalled side by side-there's an emotional connection that has nothing to do with the diary dates and everything to do with the feeling. Remembering isn't like visiting a museum: Look! There's the long-gone object in a glass case. Memory isn't an archive. Even a simple memory is a cluster. Something that seemed so insignificant at the time suddenly becomes the key when we remember it at a particular time later. We're not liars or self-deceivers-OK, we are all liars and self-deceivers, but it's a fact that our memories change as we do. Some memories, though, don't seem to change a all. They are sticky with pain. And even when we are not, consciously, remembering our memories, they seem to remember us. We can't shake free of their effect. There's a great-term for that-the old present. These things happened in the past, but they're riding right up front with us every day. (245-6)

I think that it is right and renewing to remember acts of love because, in the relative brevity of our lives, there is not time enough for loving. Until I brought myself back to recall that exuberant pleasure, I had almost forgotten about it, placed it, as I said, on the shelf, somewhere in my memory. One should be less mean with one’s memory of love, bring it out now and then, let it glow inside one as a positive element of our experiences to be cherished and to be grateful for. It is all too easy in troubled and preoccupied times to forget the blessings.

Within a decade or two, all Holocaust survivors will likely have passed away so a ticking clock is in effect in this battle between the truth and lies. Keep in mind even those survivors born in a concentration camp during WW2 would be at least 71 years-of-age when this book (the one you are reading now) was released. Those survivors old enough to clearly recall the events of that nightmare will, of course, be older and have much less time left. As the memory of the Holocaust begins to fade away, it will become easier to deny the genocide even occurred unless those of us who are truthseekers are able to embrace the memory of the genocide and educate others do the same. What’s needed in this propaganda war is for the true stories of Holocaust survivors – as well as those of the Nazi perpetrators, their associates and others who witnessed the genocide – to be told loudly and clearly so that there will never, ever be room for doubt in generations to come. After all, nothing is more powerful, credible or damning than eyewitness accounts.

Noting that it would be a long trial, with many witnesses, I recall the old Chinese proverb, "The palest ink is better than the best memory," urging the jury to take detailed notes to aid them in their deliberations.

The human mind tends to estimate the probability of an event from the ease with which it can recall examples, and scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age.1 No matter how small the percentage of violent deaths may be, in absolute numbers there will always be enough of them to fill the evening news, so people’s impressions of violence will be disconnected from the actual proportions.

Luce didn’t wait for Daniel to lean forward and kiss her. Instead, she pressed her lips to his, relishing his moan of surprised pleasure, wanting to cleanse him of any pain he’d ever felt at losing her. Kissing Daniel was somewhere between exhilaratingly new and unmistakably familiar, like a childhood memory that felt dreamlike until photographic evidence was found in an old box in the attic. Luce felt as if a hangar full of monumental photographs had been discovered, and all those buried moments had been released from their captivity into the recesses of her soul. She was kissing him now, but strangely she was kissing him then. She could almost touch the history of their love, taste its essence on her tongue. Her lips traced Daniel’s just now, but also in another kiss they’d shared, an older kiss, a kiss like this one, with her mouth just there and his arms around her waist like that. He slipped his tongue against her teeth, and that recalled a handful of other kisses, too, every one of them intoxicating. When he passed his hand across her back, she felt a hundred shivers like this one. And when her eyes fluttered open and shut, the sight of him through her tangled lashed seemed a thousand kisses deep.

The human mind tends to estimate the probability of an event from the ease with which it can recall examples, and scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age.

I looked at the eyes of the ghosts sitting around the fire and at Beeta, and suddenly I realized that we dead are the sorrowful part of life, while the living are the joyful side of death. And yet, Beeta was not joyful and it was the sad side of life that she didn't even know she should be joyful in life because there was nothing else she could do. I wanted to tell her this, but was afraid of bringing her damaged spirit down even further. Fortunately, she herself eventually spoke and said, "It seems that from among you, I am the more fortunate because nobody killed me. But I don't feel happy at all." She looked at we who had died. The dead who had been the first to meet her in the world of the living outside Razan. An old man in the group responded, "This is because you don't yet realize how beautiful, young, and healthy you are." Beeta smiled and her cheeks reddened by the light of the fire in silent emotion; and all of us who were dead saw how good the smile looked on her. But as she recalled dark memories, her smile faded and she said, "But the man who loved me simply turned his back on me and married a young girl." The middle-aged man said, "All the better! It means you were lovable enough but he wasn't smart enough to realize it.

He could close his eyes and recall the shouts of the crowds. So that is what they hope, he thought. And he remembered what the old Reverend Mother had said: Kwisatz Haderach. The memories touched his feelings of terrible purpose, shading this strange world

But human memories change each time they are recalled, Jon. This is known as memory reconsolidation. It’s part of a natural updating mechanism that imbues even old memories with current information as you recall them. Thus, human memory does not so much record the past as hold knowledge likely to be useful in the future. That’s why forgetting is a human’s default state. By contrast, remembering requires a complex cascade of chemistry. Were I to increase the concentration of protein kinase C at your synapses, your memory retention would double.

Your talents are for pointing guns and removing necklaces off ladies' necks?' 'I charm the necklaces off their necks ... Kindly make the distinction.' 'Oh, please.' 'I charmed you.' She was all indignation. 'You did not.' 'Recall the night in question, Miss Eversleigh. The moonlight, the soft wind.' 'There was no wind.' 'You're spoiling my memory,' he growled. 'There was no wind,' she stated. 'You are romanticizing the encounter.' 'Can you blame me? he returned, smiling at her wickedly. 'I never know who is going to step through the carriage door. Most of the time I get a wheezy old badger.

Gone as usual in the morning, and me left behind and naked, inner thighs lightly scaled with the dried spoor of our lovemaking: she liked to stay on top afterward and let the juice run down, and I liked whatever she liked. Imagining in the shower that I could smell her still, the angular scent of those secret bones, had she always smelled so fierce and so good? Recalling those gone times, old memories lit by the fire of the new, I did not this time wonder how long it would last; I was too smart for that now. Take what you get, and don’t think. Of course it could never be that easy, but there were moments, like now, that I could successfully pretend that it was, and I had no inclination to try to peer past those moments. I’m not one who wants to know the future: at the best it spoils the present, with longing or dismay, and at the worst, well. Who really wants to find out how tight the sling is, for your own very personal ass, who wants to know how deep the shit will really be? Not you. Not me either. Because it’s rarely bliss saved up, is it, when you finally get there. I’ll take my now, waking with a lover’s scent on me, around me, take my hopes before they’re maybe tragedy; a good morning is still a good morning, even if it leads to apocalypse at night.

The gates were thrown open by their companions upon guard, and by the domestics of the old court, who had already formed a secret conspiracy against the life of the too virtuous emperor. On the news of their approach, Pertinax, disdaining either flight or concealment, advanced to meet his assassins; and recalled to their minds his own innocence, and the sanctity of their recent oath. For a few moments they stood in silent suspense, ashamed of their atrocious design, and awed by the venerable aspect and majestic firmness of their sovereign, till at length, the despair of pardon reviving their fury, a barbarian of the country of Tongress levelled the first blow against Pertinax, who was instantly despatched with a multitude of wounds. His head, separated from his body, and placed on a lance, was carried in triumph to the Prætorian camp, in the sight of a mournful and indignant people, who lamented the unworthy fate of that excellent prince, and the transient blessings of a reign, the memory of which could serve only to aggravate their approaching misfortunes.

And numerous indeed are the hearts to which Christmas brings a brief season of happiness and enjoyment. How many families, whose members have been dispersed and scattered far and wide, in the restless struggles of life, are then reunited, and meet once again in that happy state of companionship and mutual goodwill, which is a source of such pure and unalloyed delight; and one so incompatible with the cares and sorrows of the world, that the religious belief of the most civilised nations, and the rude traditions of the roughest savages, alike number it among the first joys of a future condition of existence, provided for the blessed and happy! How many old recollections, and how many dormant sympathies, does Christmas time awaken! We write these words now, many miles distant from the spot at which, year after year, we met on that day, a merry and joyous circle. Many of the hearts that throbbed so gaily then, have ceased to beat; many of the looks that shone so brightly then, have ceased to glow; the hands we grasped, have grown cold; the eyes we sought, have hid their lustre in the grave; and yet the old house, the room, the merry voices and smiling faces, the jest, the laugh, the most minute and trivial circumstances connected with those happy meetings, crowd upon our mind at each recurrence of the season, as if the last assemblage had been but yesterday! Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fireside and his quiet home!

Wait." Walter went to the basket, taking what was a gray sleeve, drawing it out fro the middle of the heap. "Oh," He said. He held the shapeless wool sweater to his chest. Joyce had knit for months the year Daniel died, and here was the result, her handiwork, the garment that would fit a giant. It was nothing more than twelve skeins of yarn and thousands of loops, but it had the power to bring back in a flash the green-tiled walls of the hospital, the sound of an ambulance trying to cut through city traffic in the distance, the breathing of the dying boy, his father staring at the ceiling, the full greasy bucket of fried chicken on he bed table. "I'll take this one," Walter said, balling up the sweater as best he could, stuffing it into a shopping bag that was half full of the books he was taking home, that he was borrowing. "Oh, honey," Joyce said. "You don't want that old scrap." "You made it. I remember your making it." Keep it light, he said to himself, that's a boy. "There's a use for it. Don't you think so, Aunt Jeannie? No offense, Mom, but I could invade the Huns with it or strap the sleeves to my car tires in a blizzard, for traction, or protect our nation with it out in space, a shield against nuclear attack." Jeannie tittered in her usual way in spite of herself. "You always did have that sense of humor," she said as she went upstairs. When she was out of range, Joyce went to Walter's bag and retrieved the sweater. She laid it on the card table, the long arms hanging down, and she fingered the stitches. "Will you look at the mass of it," she exclaimed. "I don't even recall making it." ""'Memory -- that strange deceiver,'" Walter quoted.

And yes, I recall every entry I read. I usually memorise anything by reading it once. I took special care of her journal. Now all her words, her vents, and her confusions and fake personality are integrated into my head. When I grow old and my memory starts demanding to delete files to be able to remember others, I’d choose her stupid journal over books by philosophers and psychologists any day. Chaos. She’s fucking chaos.

I was looking at the sky and recalling. The higher you fly, the more stars there are. There are stars up there that I will never see again. They didn't matter to me when the heavens still belonged to me, but now I feel it as a loss." "You're young. You're going to find a lot of things like that in your life," the old liveship replied complacently. "No sense dwelling on them." "My life," Vivacia mused. "My life as a liveship." She turned to regard Ophelia with a sigh. "I almost envy you. You recall nothing, so you miss nothing." "I recall a lot, my dear. Just because my memories have sails instead of wings, don't discount them." She sniffed. "And my life is nothing for you to disdain, I might add. Nor your own. You could take a lesson from my Grag. Don't go mooning after the stars, when the wide sea is all around you. It's a sky of its own, you know." "And with just as many stars.

The problem is not that we forget the past. It is that we recall it too well. Children recall wrongs that enemies did to their grandfathers, and blame the granddaughters of the old enemies. Children are not born with memories of who insulted their mother or slew their grandfather or stole their land. Those hates are bequeathed to them, taught them, breathed into them. If adults didn’t tell children of their hereditary hates, perhaps we would do better.

A woman named Cynthia once told me a story about the time her father had made plans to take her on a night out in San Francisco. Twelve-year-old Cynthia and her father had been planning the “date” for months. They had a whole itinerary planned down to the minute: she would attend the last hour of his presentation, and then meet him at the back of the room at about four-thirty and leave quickly before everyone tried to talk to him. They would catch a tram to Chinatown, eat Chinese food (their favourite), shop for a souvenir, see the sights for a while and then “catch a flick” as her dad liked to say. Then they would grab a taxi back to the hotel, jump in the pool for a quick swim (her dad was famous for sneaking in when the pool was closed), order a hot fudge sundae from room service, and watch the late, late show. They discussed the details over and over again before they left. The anticipation was part of the whole experience. This was all going according to plan until, as her father was leaving the convention centre, he ran into an old college friend and business associate. It had been years since they had seen each other, and Cynthia watched as they embraced enthusiastically. His friend said, in effect: “I am so glad you are doing some work with our company now. When Lois and I heard about it we thought it would be perfect. We want to invite you, and of course Cynthia, to get a spectacular seafood dinner down at the Wharf!” Cynthia’s father responded: “Bob, it’s so great to see you. Dinner at the wharf sounds great!” Cynthia was crestfallen. Her daydreams of tram rides and ice cream sundaes evaporated in an instant. Plus, she hated seafood and she could just imagine how bored she would be listening to the adults talk all night. But then her father continued: “But not tonight. Cynthia and I have a special date planned, don’t we?” He winked at Cynthia and grabbed her hand and they ran out of the door and continued with what was an unforgettable night in San Francisco. As it happens, Cynthia’s father was the management thinker Stephen R. Covey (author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) who had passed away only weeks before Cynthia told me this story. So it was with deep emotion she recalled that evening in San Francisco. His simple decision “Bonded him to me forever because I knew what mattered most to him was me!” she said.5 One simple answer is we are unclear about what is essential. When this happens we become defenceless. On the other hand, when we have strong internal clarity it is almost as if we have a force field protecting us from the non-essentials coming at us from all directions. With Rosa it was her deep moral clarity that gave her unusual courage of conviction. With Stephen it was the clarity of his vision for the evening with his loving daughter. In virtually every instance, clarity about what is essential fuels us with the strength to say no to the non-essentials. Stephen R. Covey, one of the most respected and widely read business thinkers of his generation, was an Essentialist. Not only did he routinely teach Essentialist principles – like “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing” – to important leaders and heads of state around the world, he lived them.6 And in this moment of living them with his daughter he made a memory that literally outlasted his lifetime. Seen with some perspective, his decision seems obvious. But many in his shoes would have accepted the friend’s invitation for fear of seeming rude or ungrateful, or passing up a rare opportunity to dine with an old friend. So why is it so hard in the moment to dare to choose what is essential over what is non-essential?

She looks for a passion and finds it in the study of physics. Some nights, in the soft, helpless moments before sleep comes, she recalls their conversation on the roof about love and dark matter. He said that love and dark matter were the same - the only thing that kept the universe from flying apart. Her heart speeds up every time she thinks of it. Then she smiles in the darkness and puts the memory up on a shelf in the place for old, sentimental, impossible things.

Remember. If the rune were a word, it would have been that one, but there was more meaning to it than any word she could imagine. It was a child's first memory of light falling through crib bars, the recollected scent of rain and city streets, the pain of unforgotten loss, the sting of remembered humiliation, and the cruel forgetfulness of old age, when the most ancient of memories stand out with agonizingly clear precision and the nearest of incidents are lost beyond recall.

As psychologist Bruce Hood writes in his book The Self Illusion, you have an origin story and a sense that you’ve traveled from youth to now along a linear path, with ups and downs that ultimately made you who you are today. Babies don’t have that. That sense is built around events that you can recall and place in time. Babies and small children have what Hood calls “unconscious knowledge,” which is to say they simply recognize patterns and make associations with stimuli. Without episodic memories, there is no narrative; and without any narrative, there is no self. Somewhere between ages two and three, according to Hood, that sense of self begins to come online, and that awakening corresponds with the ability to tell a story about yourself based on memories. He points to a study by Alison Gopnik and Janet Astington in 1988 in which researchers presented to three-year-olds a box of candy, but the children were then surprised to find pencils inside instead of sweets. When they asked each child what the next kid would think was in the box when he or she went through the same experiment, the answer was usually pencils. The children didn’t yet know that other people have minds, so they assumed everyone knew what they knew. Once you gain the ability to assume others have their own thoughts, the concept of other minds is so powerful that you project it into everything: plants, glitchy computers, boats with names, anything that makes more sense to you when you can assume, even jokingly, it has a sort of self. That sense of agency is so powerful that people throughout time have assumed a consciousness at the helm of the sun, the moon, the winds, and the seas. Out of that sense of self and other selves come the narratives that have kept whole societies together. The great mythologies of the ancients and moderns are stories made up to make sense of things on a grand scale. So strong is the narrative bias that people live and die for such stories and devote whole lives to them (as well as take lives for them).

But we think that if a human were to violate conventional causality—' 'By time traveling—' 'Please, please don't call it that. If a human were to violate causality, the experience from her point of view would be similar. You would act while in the past, but not be able to recall your actions later, because that period of time for you would be lost between histories: the old one you left and the new one to which you would return. It would exist outside of the normal course of events. It would be, in a very real sense, lost time.

That peace did not come easily. I spent two years enumerating my father's flaws, constantly updating the tally as if reciting every resentment, every real and imagined act of cruelty, of neglect, would justify my decision to cut him from my life. Once justified I thought the strangling guilt would release me, and I could catch my breath. But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of ones own retchedness. It has nothing to do with other people. I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on my own terms, without endlessly prosecuting old greviences, without weighing his sins against mine. Without thinking of my father at all. I learned to accept my decision for my own sake. Because of me, not because of him. Because I needed it, not because he deserved it. It was the only way I could love him. When my father was in my life, wrestling me for control of that life, I percieved him with the eyes of a soldier, through a fog of conflict. I could not make out his tender qualities. When he was before me towering, indignant, I could not remember how when I was young his laugh used to shake his gut and make his glasses shine. In his stern presence I could never recall the pleasant way his lips used to twitch, before they were burned away, when a memory tugged tears from his eyes. I can only remember those things now, with a span of miles and years between us. But what has come between me and my father is more than time or distance. It is a change in the self. I am not the child my father raised but he is the father who raised her.

One reason Zumbado was determined to film everything in Memorial, regardless of its TV value, was that back in April 2000 he was the first cameraman in when the INS agents seized six-year-old Cuban Elián González. “The INS kicked and beat me, grabbed my camera, made me turn it off,” Zumbado recalled. “They later lied that they had roughed me up. And because I had turned my camera off, as ordered, I had no footage of what they did. They later tried to deny their actions. From that moment onward I decided to film everything. No more shutting off. Let the truth be seen.” 20

I gained great pleasure from my body back then. I gave great pleasure with it, too, if you know what I mean.” “I do,” Aomame said. “And are you enjoying yours?” “Now and then,” Aomame said. “Now and then may not be enough,” the dowager said, lying facedown again. “You have to enjoy it while you’re still young. Enjoy it to the fullest. You can use the memories of what you did to warm your body after you get old and can’t do it anymore.” Aomame recalled the night before. Her anus still retained a slight feeling of having been penetrated. Would memories of this actually warm her body in old age?

You’re suggesting the mysterious X. Where do we look for him?’ Poirot said: ‘Obviously in a close circle. There were five people, were there not, whocould have been concerned?’ ‘Five? Let me see. There was the old duffer who messed about with his herb brewing. A dangerous hobby-but an amiable creature. Vague sort of person. Don’t see him as X. There was the girl-she might have polished off Caroline, but certainly not Amyas. Then there was the stockbroker-Crale’s best friend. That’s popular in detective stories, but I don’t believe in it in real life. There’s no one else-oh yes, the kid sister, but one doesn’t seriously consider her. That’s four.’ Hercule Poirot said: ‘You forget the governess.’ ‘Yes, that’s true. Wretched people, governesses, one never does remember them. I do recall her dimly though. Middle-aged, plain, competent. I suppose a psychologist would say that she had a guilty passion for Crale and therefore killed him. The repressed spinster! It’s no good-I just don’t believe it. As far as my dim remembrance goes she wasn’t the neurotic type.’ ‘It is a long time ago.’ ‘Fifteen or sixteen years, I suppose. Yes, quite that. You can’t expect my memories of the case to be very acute.

The memory of his childhood suddenly grew dim. He tried to call forth some of its vivid moments but could not. He recalled only names. Dante, Parnell, Clane, Clongowes. A little boy had been taught geography by an old woman who kept two brushes in her wardrobe. Then he had been sent away from home to a college, he had made his first communion and eaten slim jim out of his cricket cap and watched the firelight leaping and dancing on the wall of a little bedroom in the infirmary and dreamed of being dead, of mass being said for him by the rector in a black and gold cope, of being buried then in the little graveyard of the community off the main avenue of limes. But he had not died then. Parnell had died. There had been no mass for the dead in the chapel and no procession. He had not died but he had faded out like a film in the sun. He had been lost or had wandered out of existence for he no longer existed. How strange to think of him passing out of existence in such a way, not by death but by fading out in the sun or by being lost and forgotten somewhere in the universe! It was strange to see his small body appear again for a moment: a little boy in a grey belted suit. His hands were in his side-pockets and his trousers were tucked in at the knees by elastic bands.

Am I recalling it from my own mind, or from dozens of retellings by legions of kitchen maids and ranks of scullions and herds of stable boys as they explained my presence to each other? Perhaps I have heard the story so many times, from so many sources, that I now recall it as an actual memory of my own. Is the detail the result of a six-year-old’s open absorption of all that goes on around him? Or could the completeness of the memory be the bright overlay of the Skill, and the later drugs a man takes to control his addiction to it, the drugs that bring on pains and cravings of their own? The last is most possible. Perhaps it is even probable. One hopes it is not the case.

Silent remembering is a form of prayer. No fragrance is more enchanting to re-experience than the aromatic bouquet gleaned from inhaling the cherished memories of our pastimes. We regularly spot elderly citizens sitting alone gently rocking themselves while facing the glowing sun. Although these sun worshipers might appear lonely in their state of serene solitude, they are not alone at all, because they deeply enmesh themselves in recalling the glimmering memories of days gone by. Marcel Proust wrote “In Search of Time Lost,” “As with the future, it is not all at once but grain by grain that one savors the past.” Test tasting the honeycombed memories of their bygone years, a delicate smile play out on their rose thin lips. The mellow tang of sweet tea memories – childhood adventures, coming of age rituals, wedding rites, recreational jaunts, wilderness explorations, viewing and creating art, literature, music, and poetry, sharing in the mystical experiences of life, and time spent with family – is the brew of irresistible intoxicants that we all long to sip as we grow old. The nectar mashed from a collection of choice memories produces a tray of digestible vignettes that each of us lovingly roll our silky tongues over. On the eve of lying down for the last time in the stillness of our cradled deathbeds, we will swaddle ourselves with a blanket of heartfelt love and whisper a crowning chaplet of affection for all of humanity. After all, we been heaven blessed to take with us to our final resting place an endless scroll amassing the kiss soft memories of time yore.

The sad truth is that what I could recall in five seconds all too soon needed ten, then thirty, then a full minute—like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness. There is no way around it: my memory is growing ever more distant from the spot where Naoko used to stand—ever more distant from the spot where my old self used to stand. And nothing but scenery, that view of the meadow in October, returns again and again to me like a symbolic scene in a movie. Each time it appears, it delivers a kick to some part of my mind. “Wake up,” it says. “I’m still here. Wake up and think about it. Think about why I’m still here.” The kicking never hurts me. There’s no pain at all. Just a hollow sound that echoes with each kick. And even that is bound to fade one day.

Daniel.” Luce gripped his shoulder. “What about the library you took me to? Remember?” She closed her eyes. She wasn’t thinking so much as feeling her way through a memory buried shallowly in her brain. “We came to Vienna for the weekend…I don’t remember when, but we went to see Mozart conduct The Magic Flute…at the Theater an der Wien? You wanted to see this friend of yours who worked at some old library, his name was-“ She broke off, because when she opened her eyes, the others were staring at her, incredulous. No one, least of all Luce, had expected her to be the one to know where they would find the desideratum. Daniel recovered first. He flashed her a funny smile Luce knew was full of pride. But Arriane, Roland, and Annabelle continued to gape at her as if they’d suddenly learned she spoke Chinese. Which, come to think of it, she did. Arriane wiggled a finger around inside her ear. “Do I need to ease up on the psychedelics, did LP just recall one of her past lives unprompted at the most crucial juncture ever?” “You’re a genius,” Daniel said, leaning forward and kissing her deeply. Luce blushed and leaned in to extend the kiss a little longer, but then heard a cough. “Seriously, you two,” Annabelle said. “There will be time enough for snogs if we pull this off.” “I’d say ‘get a room’ but I’m afraid we’d never see you again,” Arriane added, which caused them all to laugh. When Luce opened her eyes, Daniel had spread his wings wide. The tips brushed away broken bits of plaster and blocked the Scale angels from view. Slung over his shoulder was the black leather satchel with the halo. The Outcasts gathered the scattered starshots back into their silver sheaths. “Wingspeed, Daniel Grigori.” “To you as well.” Daniel nodded at Phil. He spun Luce around so her back was pressed to his chest and his arms fit snugly around her waist. They clasped hands over her heart. “The Foundation Library,” Daniel said to the other angels. “Follow me, I know exactly where it is.

She was interviewing one of my favorite television actors, Don Johnson of Miami Vice. As he reclined on a couch in his lovely home, Don told Barbara about the joys and difficulties in his life. He talked of past struggles with drug and alcohol abuse and work addiction. Then he spoke of his relationships with women—how exciting and attractive he found them. I could see his energy rise and his breath quicken as he spoke. An air of intoxication seemed to fill the room. Don said his problem was he liked women too much and found it hard to be with one special partner over a long period. He would develop a deep friendship and intimacy, but then his eyes would wander. I thought to myself, this man has been sexually abused! His problems sounded identical to those of adult survivors I counsel in my practice. But then I reconsidered: Maybe I’ve been working too hard. Perhaps I’m imagining a sexual abuse history that isn’t really there. Then it happened. Barbara leaned forward and, with a smile, asked, “Don, is it true that you had your first sexual relationship when you were quite young, about twelve years old, with your seventeen-year-old baby-sitter?” My jaw dropped. Don grinned back at Barbara. He cocked his head to the side; a twinkle came into his blue eyes. “Yeah,” he said, “and I still get excited just thinking about her today.” Barbara showed no alarm. The next day I wrote Barbara Walters a letter, hoping to enlighten her about the sexual abuse of boys. Had Don been a twelve-year-old girl and the baby-sitter a seventeen-year-old boy, we wouldn’t hesitate to call what had happened rape. It would make no difference how cooperative or seemingly “willing” the victim had been. The sexual contact was exploitive and premature, and would have been whether the twelve-year-old was a boy or a girl. This past experience and perhaps others like it may very well be at the root of the troubles Don Johnson has had with long-term intimacy. Don wasn’t “lucky to get a piece of it early,” as some people might think. He was sexually abused and hadn’t yet realized it.   Acknowledging past sexual abuse is an important step in sexual healing. It helps us make a connection between our present sexual issues and their original source. Some survivors have little difficulty with this step: They already see themselves as survivors and their sexual issues as having stemmed directly from sexual abuse. A woman who is raped sees an obvious connection if she suddenly goes from having a pleasurable sex life to being terrified of sex. For many survivors, however, acknowledging sexual abuse is a difficult step. We may recall events, but through lack of understanding about sexual abuse may never have labeled those experiences as sexual abuse. We may have dismissed experiences we had as insignificant. We may have little or no memory of past abuse. And we may have difficulty fully acknowledging to ourselves and to others that we were victims. It took me years to realize and admit that I had been raped on a date, even though I knew what had happened and how I felt about it. I needed to understand this was in fact rape and that I had been a victim. I needed to remember more and to stop blaming myself before I was able to acknowledge my experience as sexual abuse.

Behind the Fan by Author Caroline Walken Dottie stared at the flat white ceiling the tears subside replaced by a soft smile. All and all she has had a good life, not everyone was lucky enough to love that deeply. She remembered a time where she would catch him watching her. Nicky always looked at her with those dark, needy eyes, drinking her in. Dottie felt both exhilarated and alarmed by the emotion he evoked in her. She still recalls that first soft kiss, and then much later in the relationship, how good it felt entwined with him as dawn broke. In the beginning, it was a challenge to keep her head whenever he was near. Handsome and tall with an ornery twinkle in those soft brown eyes at all times. He was dangerous, and nothing she needed but everything she wanted. Dark hair, tall and broad-shouldered...the man was sin on earth to her. The old woman laid her head back; although weary, she resisted sleep having found comfort in her memories. Her mind tossed back his words, those that gave her solace in those early days after he passed. She expected them to fade over time until she no longer heard his voice within her. Instead, as she grew weaker, his words became stronger within her. Dottie wondered if anyone would believe their story and she regretted not having written it down before now. She feared her weary mind would never fully recall everything. It was a story of strength, one of love and partnership. Her girls could benefit from hearing it. Dottie turned to glance at her reflection; it was now deep in the night the city beyond her window slept. The woman in the glass bore silver hair and was thin, her eyes a watered version of their brilliance. Like her memory, she too had faded. She wondered if her family would see whom she had been or would they remain blinded by the frail being she had become. She had one more go left in her but after this; she was done. She had to make the most of this. To the unadorned walls she promised, “I am nearly ready Nicky, soon darling, very soon.

Over the course of two years, from June 2004 to June 2006, two separate deaths did nothing to ease my overall anxiety. Steve’s beloved Staffordshire bull terrier Sui died of cancer in June 2004. He had set up his swag and slept beside her all night, talking to her, recalling old times in the bush catching crocodiles, and comforting her. Losing Sui brought up memories of losing Chilli a decade and a half earlier. “I am not getting another dog,” Steve said. “It is just too painful.” Wes, the most loyal friend anyone could have, was there for Steve while Sui passed from this life to the next. Wes shared in Steve’s grief. They had known Sui longer than Steve and I had been together. Two years after Sui’s death, in June 2006, we lost Harriet. At 175, Harriet was the oldest living creature on earth. She had met Charles Darwin and sailed on the Beagle. She was our link to the past at the zoo, and beyond that, our link to the great scientist himself. She was a living museum and an icon of our zoo. The kids and I were headed to Fraser Island, along the southern coast of Queensland, with Joy, Steve’s sister, and her husband, Frank, our zoo manager, when I heard the news. An ultrasound had confirmed that Harriet had suffered a massive heart attack. Steve called me. “I think you’d better come home.” “I should talk to the kids about this,” I said. Bindi was horrified. “How long is Harriet going to live?” she asked. “Maybe hours, maybe days, but not long.” “I don’t want to see Harriet die,” she said resolutely. She wanted to remember her as the healthy, happy tortoise with whom she’d grown up. From the time Bindi was a tiny baby, she would enter Harriet’s enclosure, put her arms around the tortoise’s massive shell, and rest her face against her carapace, which was always warm from the sun. Harriet’s favorite food was hibiscus flowers, and Bindi would collect them by the dozen to feed her dear friend. I was worried about Steve but told him that Bindi couldn’t bear to see Harriet dying. “It’s okay,” he said. “Wes is here with me.” Once again, it fell to Wes to share his best mate’s grief.

Our story begins on a sweltering August night, in a sterile white room where a single fateful decision is made amid the mindless ravages of grief. But our story does not end there. It has not ended yet. Would I change the course of our lives if I could? Would I have spent my years plucking out tunes on a showboat, or turning the soil as a farmer’s wife, or waiting for a riverman to come home from work and settle in beside me at a cozy little fire? Would I trade the son I bore for a different son, for more children, for a daughter to comfort me in my old age? Would I give up the husbands I loved and buried, the music, the symphonies, the lights of Hollywood, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren who live far distant but have my eyes? I ponder this as I sit on the wooden bench, Judy’s hand in mine, the two of us quietly sharing yet another Sisters’ Day. Here in the gardens at Magnolia Manor, we’re able to have Sisters’ Day anytime we like. It is as easy as leaving my room, and walking to the next hall, and telling the attendant, “I believe I’ll take my dear friend Judy out for a little stroll. Oh yes, of course, I’ll be certain she’s delivered safely back to the Memory Care Unit. You know I always do.” Sometimes, my sister and I laugh over our clever ruse. “We’re really sisters, not friends,” I remind her. “But don’t tell them. It’s our secret.” “I won’t tell.” She smiles in her sweet way. “But sisters are friends as well. Sisters are special friends.” We recall our many Sisters’ Day adventures from years past, and she begs me to share what I remember of Queenie and Briny and our life on the river. I tell her of days and seasons with Camellia, and Lark, and Fern, and Gabion, and Silas, and Old Zede. I speak of quiet backwaters and rushing currents, the midsummer ballet of dragonflies and winter ice floes that allowed men to walk over water. Together, we travel the living river. We turn our faces to the sunlight and fly time and time again home to Kingdom Arcadia. Other days, my sister knows me not at all other than as a neighbor here in this old manor house. But the love of sisters needs no words. It does not depend on memories, or mementos, or proof. It runs as deep as a heartbeat. It is as ever present as a pulse. “Aren’t they so very sweet?

Focus intently and beat procrastination.    Use the Pomodoro Technique (remove distractions, focus for 25 minutes, take a break).    Avoid multitasking unless you find yourself needing occasional fresh perspectives.    Create a ready-to-resume plan when an unavoidable interruption comes up.    Set up a distraction-free environment.    Take frequent short breaks. Overcome being stuck.    When stuck, switch your focus away from the problem at hand, or take a break to surface the diffuse mode.    After some time completely away from the problem, return to where you got stuck.    Use the Hard Start Technique for homework or tests.    When starting a report or essay, do not constantly stop to edit what is flowing out. Separate time spent writing from time spent editing. Learn deeply.    Study actively: practice active recall (“retrieval practice”) and elaborating.    Interleave and space out your learning to help build your intuition and speed.    Don’t just focus on the easy stuff; challenge yourself.    Get enough sleep and stay physically active. Maximize working memory.    Break learning material into small chunks and swap fancy terms for easier ones.    Use “to-do” lists to clear your working memory.    Take good notes and review them the same day you took them. Memorize more efficiently.    Use memory tricks to speed up memorization: acronyms, images, and the Memory Palace.    Use metaphors to quickly grasp new concepts. Gain intuition and think quickly.    Internalize (don’t just unthinkingly memorize) procedures for solving key scientific or mathematical problems.    Make up appropriate gestures to help you remember and understand new language vocabulary. Exert self-discipline even when you don’t have any.    Find ways to overcome challenges without having to rely on self-discipline.    Remove temptations, distractions, and obstacles from your surroundings.    Improve your habits.    Plan your goals and identify obstacles and the ideal way to respond to them ahead of time. Motivate yourself.    Remind yourself of all the benefits of completing tasks.    Reward yourself for completing difficult tasks.    Make sure that a task’s level of difficulty matches your skill set.    Set goals—long-term goals, milestone goals, and process goals. Read effectively.    Preview the text before reading it in detail.    Read actively: think about the text, practice active recall, and annotate. Win big on tests.    Learn as much as possible about the test itself and make a preparation plan.    Practice with previous test questions—from old tests, if possible.    During tests: read instructions carefully, keep track of time, and review answers.    Use the Hard Start Technique. Be a pro learner.    Be a metacognitive learner: understand the task, set goals and plan, learn, and monitor and adjust.    Learn from the past: evaluate what went well and where you can improve.

Meanwhile, scientists are studying certain drugs that may erase traumatic memories that continue to haunt and disturb us. In 2009, Dutch scientists, led by Dr. Merel Kindt, announced that they had found new uses for an old drug called propranolol, which could act like a “miracle” drug to ease the pain associated with traumatic memories. The drug did not induce amnesia that begins at a specific point in time, but it did make the pain more manageable—and in just three days, the study claimed. The discovery caused a flurry of headlines, in light of the thousands of victims who suffer from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). Everyone from war veterans to victims of sexual abuse and horrific accidents could apparently find relief from their symptoms. But it also seemed to fly in the face of brain research, which shows that long-term memories are encoded not electrically, but at the level of protein molecules. Recent experiments, however, suggest that recalling memories requires both the retrieval and then the reassembly of the memory, so that the protein structure might actually be rearranged in the process. In other words, recalling a memory actually changes it. This may be the reason why the drug works: propranolol is known to interfere with adrenaline absorption, a key in creating the long-lasting, vivid memories that often result from traumatic events. “Propranolol sits on that nerve cell and blocks it. So adrenaline can be present, but it can’t do its job,” says Dr. James McGaugh of the University of California at Irvine. In other words, without adrenaline, the memory fades. Controlled tests done on individuals with traumatic memories showed very promising results. But the drug hit a brick wall when it came to the ethics of erasing memory. Some ethicists did not dispute its effectiveness, but they frowned on the very idea of a forgetfulness drug, since memories are there for a purpose: to teach us the lessons of life. Even unpleasant memories, they said, serve some larger purpose. The drug got a thumbs-down from the President’s Council on Bioethics. Its report concluded that “dulling our memory of terrible things [would] make us too comfortable with the world, unmoved by suffering, wrongdoing, or cruelty.… Can we become numb to life’s sharpest sorrows without also becoming numb to its greatest joys?” Dr. David Magus of Stanford University’s Center for Biomedical Ethics says, “Our breakups, our relationships, as painful as they are, we learn from some of those painful experiences. They make us better people.” Others disagree. Dr. Roger Pitman of Harvard University says that if a doctor encounters an accident victim who is in intense pain, “should we deprive them of morphine because we might be taking away the full emotional experience? Who would ever argue with that? Why should psychiatry be different? I think that somehow behind this argument lurks the notion that mental disorders are not the same as physical disorders.

Steve Jobs knew from an early age that he was adopted. “My parents were very open with me about that,” he recalled. He had a vivid memory of sitting on the lawn of his house, when he was six or seven years old, telling the girl who lived across the street. “So does that mean your real parents didn’t want you?” the girl asked. “Lightning bolts went off in my head,” according to Jobs. “I remember running into the house, crying. And my parents said, ‘No, you have to understand.’ They were very serious and looked me straight in the eye. They said, ‘We specifically picked you out.’ Both of my parents said that and repeated it slowly for me. And they put an emphasis on every word in that sentence.” Abandoned. Chosen. Special. Those concepts became part of who Jobs was and how he regarded himself. His closest friends think that the knowledge that he was given up at birth left some scars. “I think his desire for complete control of whatever he makes derives directly from his personality and the fact that he was abandoned at birth,” said one longtime colleague, Del Yocam. “He wants to control his environment, and he sees the product as an extension of himself.” Greg Calhoun, who became close to Jobs right after college, saw another effect. “Steve talked to me a lot about being abandoned and the pain that caused,” he said. “It made him independent. He followed the beat of a different drummer, and that came from being in a different world than he was born into.” Later in life, when he was the same age his biological father had been when he abandoned him, Jobs would father and abandon a child of his own. (He eventually took responsibility for her.) Chrisann Brennan, the mother of that child, said that being put up for adoption left Jobs “full of broken glass,” and it helps to explain some of his behavior. “He who is abandoned is an abandoner,” she said. Andy Hertzfeld, who worked with Jobs at Apple in the early 1980s, is among the few who remained close to both Brennan and Jobs. “The key question about Steve is why he can’t control himself at times from being so reflexively cruel and harmful to some people,” he said. “That goes back to being abandoned at birth. The real underlying problem was the theme of abandonment in Steve’s life.” Jobs dismissed this. “There’s some notion that because I was abandoned, I worked very hard so I could do well and make my parents wish they had me back, or some such nonsense, but that’s ridiculous,” he insisted. “Knowing I was adopted may have made me feel more independent, but I have never felt abandoned. I’ve always felt special. My parents made me feel special.” He would later bristle whenever anyone referred to Paul and Clara Jobs as his “adoptive” parents or implied that they were not his “real” parents. “They were my parents 1000%,” he said. When speaking about his biological parents, on the other hand, he was curt: “They were my sperm and egg bank. That’s not harsh, it’s just the way it was, a sperm bank thing, nothing more.

THE INSTRUCTION OF PTAHHOTEP Part IV If you are mighty, gain respect through knowledge And through gentleness of speech. Don’t command except as is fitting, He who provokes gets into trouble. Don't be haughty, lest you be humbled, Don’t be mute, lest you be chided. When you answer one who is fuming, Avert your face, control yourself. The flame of the hot-heart sweeps across. He who steps gently, his path is paved. He who frets all day has no happy moment, He who’s gay all day can’t keep house. Don’t oppose a great man’s action. Don’t vex the heart of one who is burdened; If he gets angry at him who foils him, The ka will part from him who loves him. Yet he is the provider along with the god, What he wishes should be done for him. When he turns his face back to you after raging, There will be peace from his ka; As ill will comes from opposition,. So goodwill increases love. Teach the great what is useful to him, Be his aid before the people; If you Set his knowledge impress his lord, Your sustenance will come from his ka As the favorite's belly is filled. So your back will be clothed by it, And his help will be there sustain you. For your superior whom you love And who lives by it, He in turn will give you good support. Thus will love of you endure In the belly of those who love you, He is a ka who loves to listen. If you are a magistrate of standing. Commissioned to satisfy the many, Hew a straight line, When you speak don't lean to one side. Beware lest one complain: “Judges, he distorts the matter!” And your deed turns into a judgment (of you). If you are angered by misdeed. Lean toward a man account of his rightness; Pass it over, don’t recall it, Since he was silent to you the first day If you are great after having been humble, Have gained wealth after having been poor In the past, in a town which you know, Knowing your former condition. Do not put trust in your wealth, Which came to you as gift of god; So that you will not fall behind one like you, To whom the same has happened, Bend your back to your superior, Your overseer from the palace; Then your house will endure in its wealth. Your rewards in their right place. Wretched is he who opposes a superior, One lives as long as he is mild, Baring the arm does not hurt it Do not plunder a neighbor’s house, Do not steal the goods of one near you, Lest he denounce you before you are heard A quarreler is a mindless person, If he is known as an aggressor The hostile man will have trouble in the neighborhood. This maxim is an injunction against illicit sexual intercourse. It is very obscure and has been omitted here. If you probe the character of a friend, Don’t inquire, but approach him, Deal with him alone, So as not to suffer from his manner. Dispute with him after a time, Test his heart in conversation; If what he has seen escapes him, If he does a thing that annoys you, Be yet friendly with him, don’t attack; Be restrained, don’t let fly, Don’t answer with hostility, Neither part from him nor attack him; His time does not fail to come, One does not escape what is fated Be generous as long as you live, What leaves the storehouse does not return; It is the food to be shared which is coveted. One whose belly is empty is an accuser; One deprived becomes an opponent, Don’t have him for a neighbor. Kindness is a man’s memorial For the years after the function.

In the shop, breathing the scent of dusty grease and oil; in the old house, staring into the living room where Dad and Jake used to take naps together on the couch; in the sheep barn, remembering the joy implicit in so much baaing life; in every inch of the farm, I recalled my father’s presence.

THE SUPERMEMO MODEL HOW TO REMEMBER EVERYTHING YOU HAVE EVER LEARNED Long-term memory has two components: retrievability and stability. Retrievability determines how easily we remember something, and depends on how near the surface of our consciousness the information is ‘swimming’. Stability, on the other hand, is to do with how deeply information is anchored in our brains. Some memories have a high level of stability but a low level of retrievability. Try to recall one of your old phone numbers – you probably won’t be able to. But if you see the number in front of you, you will recognise it immediately. Imagine that you are learning Chinese. You have learned a word and memorised it. Without practice, over time it will become increasingly difficult to remember. The amount of time it takes for you to forget it completely can be calculated, and ideally you should be reminded of the word precisely when you are in the process of forgetting it. The more often you are reminded of the word, the longer you will remember it for. This learning programme is called Super-Memo and was developed by the Polish researcher Piotr Woźniak. It’s not what you know, it’s what you remember. Jan Cox After learning something, you should ideally refresh your memory of it at the following intervals: one, ten, thirty and sixty days afterwards.

And as the years have passed, the time has grown longer. The sad truth is that what I could recall in 5 seconds all too soon needed 10, then 30, then a full minute - like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness. There is no way around it: my memory is growing ever more distant from the spot where Naoko used to stand - where my old self used to stand. And nothing but scenery, that view of the meadow in October, returns again and again to me like a symbolic scene in a film. Each time it appears, it delivers a kick to some part of my mind.

Like them I'd made that journey from India to Massachusetts, too old not to experience the shock of it, too young to have a say in the matter. They would recall all of this, perhaps not as clearly as I remember those first months at your parents' home, but nevertheless they would remember. Like them I had lost a parent and was now being asked to accept a replacement. I wondered how well they remembered their father; Piu would only have been five at the time. Even my memories of my mother had begun to break apart in the three and a half years since her death, the thousands of days I had spent with her reduced to a handful of stock scenes. I was lucky, compared to Rupa and Piu, having had my mother for as long as I did. The knowledge of death seemed present in both sisters—it was something about the way they carried themselves, something that had broken too soon and had not mended, marking

To have a part in helping the new New Jerseyan see the New Jersey it was given to me to find thirty years ago is a very special honor all by itself. HENRY CHARLTON BECK Hillcrest Farm, Robbinsville, New Jersey February, 1963 FOREWORD THE appearance of Forgotten Towns of Southern New Jersey was rewarded by a generous and somewhat surprising response. From the time of its publication and during the research for and preparation of More Forgotten Towns my letter-box has guarded, until my returning, friendly messages from all parts of New Jersey, as well as from a number of other States-some far away-bearing encouragement, suggestion, and additional information. Although so many of the old villages seemed destined to die unmourned, many who were born in or near them, or whose forebears called them home, have shown they were not utterly forgotten and that the memories refreshed concerning them make the exciting task worth while. I say "exciting" and I mean just that, for although the work was first begun and continued with the author convinced that he, and a few others, were a bit-potty, shall I say?-on the subject, these letters have shown that our quirkiness is not so exclusive. I have attempted, insofar as I have been able, to reply to all those who have revealed their interest in the romance of decadent things which, whether they call it that or something else, makes us friends. I hope I have shown my appreciation as best I may in this new book and in others that, Deo Volente, I hope to write. As long as there are places and people in danger of being forgotten, when they ought not to be, in spite of whatever change and chance may come, there will be a job to do. Many have asked, and perhaps will continue to ask, why this town or that has not been included among those recalled in this or the previous book. Such a question has required a variety of answers. Some towns are important today, even

It was a child’s first memory of light falling through crib bars, the recollected scent of rain and city streets, the pain of unforgotten loss, the sting of remembered humiliation, and the cruel forgetfulness of old age, when the most ancient of memories stand out with agonizingly clear precision and the nearest of incidents are lost beyond recall.

Voluntary memory, the memory of the intellect and the eyes, [gives] us only imprecise facsimiles of the past which no more resemble it than pictures by bad painters resemble the spring.… So we don’t believe that life is beautiful because we don’t recall it, but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated, and similarly we think we no longer love the dead, because we don’t remember them, but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears. A

Why, when he’d been a kid . . . The mail coach arrived before Corvolo had a chance to tell Poldarn the complete history of his life, which was probably just as well. Corvolo had an amazing memory and could recall trivial conversations from thirty years ago, apparently word for word. If the coach had been even a quarter of an hour late, Poldarn was sure he’d have murdered the old man.

Hearing stories about Goran alon gar Kaggawa over the past few years had given Sume the impression that he was a charming, likable man, always full of humour and energy. Perhaps she even recalled it, in a memory that overlapped her brother Oji’s, because they had been similar in many ways. But mostly, she only remembered Goro the town drunk, the washed-up merchant, the man who couldn’t even be trusted to buy a sack of rice without wasting it on wine along the way. She remembered waking up in the middle of a night to the neighbour’s dog barking, which always meant that—for that night, at least—her father had managed to find his way back home. She would open the front door to find him vomiting in the garden or passed out by the steps. Because Hana would scold the old man if she woke her up to help, she always brought him in herself, heating up water to wash his face with. Goro, if he woke up during these ministrations, would begin crying. He never told her the reason—he never spoke much in the years after her mother’s death—but even as a child, she could guess why. People find strength, or they break. There is enough room in a lifetime for both.

I have not danced the waltz in several years, and what memories I have of it are few and dim. Perhaps you’d take pity on a lame soldier and see whether he can recall it?” He expected her to laugh. On his bad days he was lame, and most days he was at least unsound, as an old horse might be unsound. He had not danced the waltz since being injured, had never hoped to again because it required grace, balance, and a little derring-do. Also a willing partner. Louisa put her bare hand in his and rose. “The pleasure would be mine.” Her lips quirked as she stood, but she didn’t drop his hand. “You must not allow me to lead.” He’d watched a hundred couples dancing a hundred waltzes, and had enjoyed the dance himself when it was first becoming popular on the Continent. The steps were simple. What was not simple at all was the feel of Louisa Windham, matter-of-factly stepping quite close, clasping his palm to her own. “I like to just listen for a moment,” she said, “to feel the music inside, feel the way it wants to move you, to lift your steps and infuse you with lightness.” She slipped in closer, so close her hair tickled Joseph’s jaw. Her hand settled on his shoulder, and he felt her swaying minutely as the orchestra launched into the opening bars. She moved with the rhythm of the music, let it shift her even as she stood virtually in his embrace. What he felt inside was a marvelous sense of privilege, to be holding Louisa Windham close to his body, to have the warm, female shape of her there beneath his hands. Her scent, clean and a little spicy, was sweeter when she was this close. She wasn’t as tall in his embrace as she was in his imagination. Against his body, she fit… perfectly. And with the sense of privilege and wonder, there lurked a current of arousal. Louisa Windham was lovely, dear, smart, and brave, but she was also a grown woman whom Joseph had found desirable from the moment he’d laid eyes on her. He waited until the phrasing felt right, closed his fingers gently around hers, then moved off with his partner. She shifted with him, the embodiment of grace, as weightless as sunshine, as fluid as laughter. “You lead well,” she whispered, her eyes half closed. “You’re a natural.” He was a man plagued by a bad knee and a questionable hip, but with Louisa Windham for a partner and the music of an eighteen-piece orchestra to buoy him, Joseph Carrington danced. The longer they moved together, the better they danced. Louisa let him lead, let him guide her this way and that, let him decide how much sweep to give the turns and how closely to enfold her. She gave herself up to the music, and thus a little to him, as well, and yet, she anchored him too. Dancing with a woman who enjoyed the waltz this much gave a man some bodily confidence. He brought her closer, wonderfully closer, and realized what gave him such joy was not simply the physical pleasure of holding her but the warmth in his heart generated by her trust. She was dancing with a lame soldier, with a pig farmer, and enjoying it. All too soon, the music wound to a sweet final cadence, but Louisa did not sink into the closing curtsy. She instead stood in the circle of Joseph’s arms and dropped her forehead to his shoulder. “Sir Joseph, thank you.” What

It’s a cool morning, raining out, and you’re a thirty-eight-year-old woman who can’t remember a thing about her life. A strange amnesia, one you never notice until moments like this, when you’re asked to recall what made you—and all you have is a dark space where memories should be. Your mind is never so quiet as when you reach for the past. You would think a predator is near. You would think a vast part of you is hiding. Praying not to be seen, even by you.

Memory is subjected to a psychological process consisting of the recall of an event. When recalling an event from memory, distortion and selection of certain cues take place. When emphasis is placed on a cue, the cue becomes more and more dominant because of the positive feedback involved in the conditioning. The more sexually stimulating the fantasy becomes, the greater the likelihood that the progression to a masturbatory fantasy will occur. Consequently, through conditioning, it is the fantasy itself that becomes more and more erotically arousing. McGuire et al. (1965) offered a paraphilic case example to illuminate this fantasy progression. A 17-year-old male had witnessed a young girl changing clothes through an open window. He was initially stimulated by this encounter and subsequently took to masturbating while remembering the incident. With the passage of time, the memory of the actual event became vague. However, advertisements and shop window displays of women’s lingerie continually reminded him of the initial image. These visual cues were used as part of his fantasy and, through the course of 3 years, his sexual interests in women gradually and consistently changed to include an erotic fascination with female undergarments. To sustain his paraphilic fantasy, the man either bought or stole these items.

Expect this stage [our storage, hobby, and play areas] of minimizing to stir up emotions and recall memories both sweet and bittersweet. You may encounter old photo albums whose pages you haven't turned in decades, mementos of celebrations long gone by, trophies you formerly sweated to win, personal objects you remember being in the possession of loved ones you've lost, the wedding dress you wore..., the stuffed bunny your daughter fell asleep clutching throughout infancy, and art supplies you once envisioned yourself creating beauty with. The experience at times may warm your heart and at times may fill you with sensations of regret, loss, or failure. Don't back away from these emotions. Work your way through them. This might be just the opportunity you need to process the past and position yourself better for the future.

Have you ever walked down a crowded street, smelling a familiar scent and trying to look around for a familiar shadow or hearing a familiar voice? Then you felt a sharp pain recalling old sweet memories you shared with someone, and you wished you could see even a glimpse of them.

As Time’s inexorable gray tides sweep us to the vortex of Eternity we become given to looking back and, in the shade of retrospect, the things once perceived as small appear smaller, those recalled as large grow larger still, youth’s sadnesses seem infinitely sadder, its light moments lighter, bright-hued balloons of carnival-past, for nostalgia is a dewy-eyed old teller of tall tales, and memory warps as does the faulted mirror, enabling us to see with astonishing clarity that which never was…

Our memories are not like old books in the library, lying there dusty and unchanged; they are rather like a living, breathing entity. What we remember today of our past is in fact a product of editing and reshaping that occurs over the years whenever we recall that particular memory. In other words, our current experiences shape our view of our past ones. By creating your own attachment inventory, you reexamine your recollections of past relationship experiences from a fresh new perspective.

Is this not the archive that can only be entered by the royal family?” I asked. “I would not think so. This is a very old memory, but I recall archduke candidates being able to enter as well. Furthermore... not once have I attempted to hide anything. In fact, during many an Archduke Conference have I asked for the king to come here.

most of the time when we recall a memory, we are conscious that we are in the present, recalling something from the past. However, when we experience something in the present that triggers an old trauma memory, we reexperience the sense of the original trauma.

Train your brain for speed: The basic mantra here is “use it or lose it.” When you’re consistently working your brain, especially in places where you have to make quick decisions, you’re promoting the growth of neurons, connections, and the hippocampus. Two studies found that 70- to 75-year-olds who regularly played speed-of-processing games (games in which you have to think and analyze situations quickly) for just 18 hours over a 10-year period experienced more than a 25 percent decreased risk of dementia over those 10 years, and an increase in acetylcholine (an important neurotransmitter that is key for memory recall) in key brain regions.14 15 (We expect that playing speed games on your phone or Ping-Pong or anything that requires your brain to act fast would also be beneficial.)

And as you finally enter your own old age, whenever you can’t recall something, you blame it on aging. When you do this, you’re actively manifesting the stereotype you grew up hearing applied to older people, but now you’re directing it at yourself. This, in turn, can lead to stress, which can reduce memory performance.

But the growing body of evidence makes clear that the memory inside our heads is the product of an extraordinarily complex natural process that is, at every instant, exquisitely tuned to the unique environment in which each of us lives and the unique pattern of experiences that each of us goes through. The old botanical metaphors for memory, with their emphasis on continual, indeterminate organic growth, are, it turns out, remarkably apt. In fact, they seem to be more fitting than our new, fashionably high-tech metaphors, which equate biological memory with the precisely defined bits of digital data stored in databases and processed by computer chips. Governed by highly variable biological signals, chemical, electrical, and genetic, every aspect of human memory—the way it’s formed, maintained, connected, recalled—has almost infinite gradations. Computer memory exists as simple binary bits—ones and zeros—that are processed through fixed circuits, which can be either open or closed but nothing in between.

In the first phase, the native intellectual gives proof that he has assimilated the culture of the occupying power. His writings correspond point by point with those of his opposite numbers in the mother country. His inspiration is European and we can easily link up these works with definite trends in the literature of the mother country. This is the period of unqualified assimilation. We find in this literature coming from the colonies the Parnassians, the Symbolists, and the Surrealists. In the second phase we find the native is disturbed; he decides to remember what he is. This period of creative work approximately corresponds to that immersion which we have just described. But since the native is not a part of his people, since he only has exterior relations with his people, he is content to recall their life only. Past happenings of the byegone days of his chlidhood will be brought up out of the depths of his memory; old legends will be reinterpreted in the light of a borrowed estheticism and of a conception of the world which was discovered under other skies.

This time it was a strawberry shortcake with homemade whipped cream. If Angela closed her eyes, she could still remember the fluffy perfection of the shortcake, the ripe flavor of the strawberries, the sweet thickness of the cream. But more than that, she remembered a summer day from her childhood that the cake made her recall. She'd been only seven years old, and on the hottest day of the summer, she and Daddy had gone down to Sweet Creek, which ran right through town, meandering behind houses and through the park, until it emptied into Dove Pond itself. Daddy had loved creeks, and there was nothing he liked better than to roll up his pants and walk barefoot over rocks worn smooth by cool, shimmering water. She'd learned to love that same experience herself. That summer day, the heat of the late afternoon had dissipated as the coolness of the water washed over their feet. They'd held hands as they walked, and had laughed and talked as they splashed and scared off more fish than she could count. Oh, how she relished that memory. And Ella's cake had made it so immediate, so real, that when Angela had finished swallowing the final bite, she'd had to wipe away happy tears. That had been one of the best days of her life. But then that was the beauty of an Ella Dove cake. It wasn't just the flawlessness of the bake, or the richness of the flavors, although they were something to behold themselves. It was the unexpected memories of those perfect combinations of flavor and texture stirred. The glimpses of special, exquisite moments from one's past were astoundingly real and, oh, so precious.

At some point Hans Zimmer came on board. This is the same Hans Zimmer who later went on to compose soundtracks for Gladiator, The Lion King, Inception, etc., but back then was a 23-year-old budding keyboard genius who came with his very own Prophet-5, which was a five-note polyphonic keyboard. The Prophet-5 was something of a revelation. Prior to that we’d been using our old Polymoog synth, which as well as being a bit temperamental, lacked the ability to ‘remember’ sounds. The Prophet-5 allowed you to program a sound and then save it to patch memory, meaning you could recall your programmed sound at the touch of a button.

Cosimo heard was the Philebus, in which Socrates, arguing against the hedonistic Philebus, declared that “wisdom and thought and memory and their kindred, right opinion and true reasonings, are better and more excellent than pleasure.”22 At which point, as Ficino wrote, Cosimo “was recalled from this shadow of life and approached the heavenly light.”23 At Cosimo’s bedside as he passed from the shadow of life was his grandson, the son of Piero, a fifteen-year-old boy named Lorenzo.

His voice jolted Zoe out of her memories. Eyes fixed on the elegant bridge that arced over the Golden Gate, she recalled Uncle Yuan’s words as they sailed into San Francisco Bay: “Old Gold Mountain will give you a bright future.” Chasing their destiny, Chinese had called San Francisco Old Gold Mountain since the 1840s gold rush. But Zoe knew she was different from the dreamers of a hundred years ago. “I’m seeking knowledge, modern science, and technology, not gold,” she told herself. After the horror of the Japanese occupations and the chaos of China’s civil war, she’d been so happy in San Francisco. But after reading her father’s letter, even the glorious March day, with the bay a sea of diamonds under the bright sun, couldn’t ease her distress. Gloom descended and her eyes filled with tears. What a beautiful city, but I must leave you.

I have been told by many that their life is wonderful, that life’s a game, but it’s not fair, I break the rules, so I don’t care! That it is thrilling to be part of the freaking world of butt holes. I got news for you; I did want all that. I have been tooled, that dying you see the light too, along with the flashing by of your stupid pathetic life. Yet, at least I had a stupid pathetic life. Just like my great-grandma Nevaeh Natalie, grandmother Jaylynn, and my freaked-up mother Kristen, oh, and also my dad, and mom said- ‘she was born on May 12, 2001.’ She had me later on in life to another freakier she’s even more freaked up than my step-monster, after Brandon my real dad passed from something that I cannot protonate, I don’t want to talk about it- finding out how she left him, for someone else other than him, which she said she would happen or never- ever do. He ended it… Besides, that was it… I am not saying more; I do not want to… I don’t freaking have to. Freak that crap in the butt! Yet sometimes, I feel like such a steep child, yet in a way that is just what I am. However, my daddy loves me anyway, yet my little sis is their biological child. I was adopted before they realized that freaking one another in the old-school hallways would not work for them, anyway, it would not be long until she gets knocked up, with my pain in the butt sister Kellie. When she dropped out. I never really knew my real dad; my dad was always the one that was everything to me. Yet my mom is the monster, and I the mutant, (E-ugh! She said- ‘When she saw me as a baby girl in the nursery.’) However, she felt that way about me since day one, and I feel the same, damn- yes, the same way the same damn way. It was a new day… that fell to me… to me if you think about it; I have always been falling. Honestly, I thought that someday, ‘I would do wonder and crap cucumbers.’ Never truly pondering my last moments on this gray-green dying plant, we call earth. Looking over those visions from my past, my mind seems rather dreadful, nasty, and bleak. Just plan sadly really. Lonely in my memories, I felt that nearly if not all things would have improved if it was just covered up, covered over, and forgotten about completely in sixth grade. A failure to recall if you do well. That would be awesome.

The mental Images were liquifying So I could no longer separate what I was recalling from the past from what I'd seen in detailed photos that afternoon. Like life. I've long suspected that many of my memories from childhood Are actually drawn from old pictures, That they are composed of snapshots, A mosaic of celluloids Images reworked into a remembered reality. Kodak cast backwards. Maybe it's better to recall The pass that way. We rarely take pictures of sad occasions.

The mental images were liquifying so I could no longer separate what I was recalling from the past from what I'd seen in detailed photos that afternoon. Like life. I've long suspected that many of my memories from childhood are actually drawn from old pictures, That they are composed of snapshots, A mosaic of celluloids Images reworked into a remembered reality. Kodak cast backwards. Maybe it's better to recall the past that way. We rarely take pictures of sad occasions.

Telling your story. All forgiveness must begin by facing the truth. You can write down in a journal or tell a trusted friend what happened. Telling your story also allows you to integrate the memories in your consciousness and defuse some of your emotional reactivity. To help heal the memories and avoid retraumatizing yourself, it is helpful to imagine that you are watching the event happen in a movie. This way you may reduce the chances of triggering the brain’s neural stress response. One scientific protocol by Ethan Kross and his colleagues suggests recalling your experience this way: Close your eyes. Go back to the time and place of the emotional experience and see the scene in your mind’s eye. Now take a few steps back. Move away from the situation to a point where you can watch the event unfold from a distance and see yourself in the event, the distant you. Watch the experience unfold as if it were happening to the distant you all over again. Observe your distant self. Naming the hurt. The facts are the facts, but these experiences caused strong emotions and pain, which are important to name. As you watch the situation unfold around your distant self, try to understand his or her feelings. Why did he or she have those feelings? What were the causes and reasons for the feelings? If the hurt is fresh, ask yourself, “Will this situation affect me in ten years?” If the hurt is old, ask yourself whether you want to continue to carry this pain or whether you want to free yourself from this pain and suffering. Granting forgiveness. The ability to forgive comes from the recognition of our shared humanity and the acknowledgment that, inevitably, because we are human we hurt and are hurt by one another. Can you accept the humanity of the person who hurt you and the fact that they likely hurt you out of their own suffering? If you can accept your shared humanity, then you can release your presumed right to revenge and can move toward healing rather than retaliation. We also recognize that, especially between intimates, there can be multiple hurts, and we often need to forgive and ask for forgiveness at the same time, accepting our part in the human drama. Renewing or releasing the relationship. Once you have forgiven someone, you must make the important decision of whether you want to renew the relationship or release it. If the trauma is significant, there is no going back to the relationship that you had before, but there is the opportunity for a new relationship. When we renew relationships, we can benefit from healing our family or community. When we release the relationship, we can move on, especially if we can truly wish the best for the person who has harmed us, and recognize that they, like us, simply want to avoid suffering and be happy in their life.

I once fell in love with a girl whose parents had divorced when she was very young. She told me about how, having learned from her mother what was going to happen—that the two of them and her baby sister were going to move into a new house, across town—she became preoccupied with questions of what you can and cannot take with you when you move. Repeatedly, she went back to her mother for clarification. Can I take my desk? My dog? My books? My crayons? Years later, a psychologist would suggest that perhaps this fixation on what she could and could not take had arisen because she had already been told what they were not going to take: her father. And, if not a father, what should a little girl be allowed to hold on to? At the time, I felt ill-equipped to judge this hypothesis, but I did have my doubts about the validity of the memory itself. I asked Maddie whether it wasn’t possible that she did not, in fact, recall the actual moment in which she asked these questions, but rather whether her mother had told her the story so many times that it had retroactively acquired the status of a memory in her mind. Eventually, Maddie would concede that maybe the memory had, in fact, been born in her mother’s telling. But she also said that she did not see what difference this made, if either way it was part of her story and she was not going out of her way to delude herself. She also remarked that it surprised her not to remember anything at all about the actual moment of separation from her father, despite it being one of her life’s most critical developments. I asked how old she’d been at the time. Four, she said. Four going on five. Being under the impression that my own superior memory would never have excised such an event, I suggested that maybe Maddie was one of those people who don’t remember anything from before they were, say, six. I was very arrogant then. It would not surprise me to learn that when Maddie thinks of our time together she does not remember loving me at all.

First Encounters with Joy At some point around this time, Lewis’s already rich imaginative life took a new turn. Lewis later recalled three early experiences which he regarded as shaping one of his life’s chief concerns. The first of these took place when the fragrance of a “flowering currant bush” in the garden at Little Lea triggered a memory of his time in the “Old House”—Dundela Villas, which Albert Lewis had then rented from a relative.[29] Lewis speaks of experiencing a transitory, delectable sense of desire, which overwhelmed him. Before he had worked out what was happening, the experience had passed, leaving him “longing for the longing that had just ceased.” It seemed to Lewis to be of enormous importance. “Everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.” But what did it mean? The second experience came when reading Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin (1903). Though Lewis admired Potter’s books in general at this time, something about this work sparked an intense longing for something he clearly struggled to describe—“the Idea of Autumn.”[30] Once more, Lewis experienced the same intoxicating sense of “intense desire.” The third came when he read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation of a few lines from the Swedish poet Esaias Tegnér (1782–1846):[31] I heard a voice that cried, Balder the beautiful Is dead, is dead— Lewis found the impact of these words devastating. It was as if they opened a door that he did not know existed, allowing him to see a new realm beyond his own experience, which he longed to enter and possess. For a moment, nothing else seemed to matter. “I knew nothing of Balder,” he recalled, “but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, [and] I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote).”[32] Yet even before Lewis had realised what was happening to him, the experience passed, and left him longing to be able to reenter it.

Memories are like that. They live between synapses and between the people who hold them. Memories, even epic ones, are perishable from their very formation even in people who don’t soak their brains in mood-altering chemicals. There is only so much space on any one person’s hard drive, and old memories are prone to replacement by newer ones. There’s even a formula for the phenomena: In the Ebbinghaus curve, or forgetting curve, R stands for memory retention, s is the relative strength of memory, and t is time. The power of a memory can be built through repetition, but it is the memory we are recalling when we speak, not the event.

The old botanical metaphors for memory, with their emphasis on continual, indeterminate organic growth, are, it turns out, remarkably apt. In fact, they seem to be more fitting than our new, fashionably high-tech metaphors, which equate biological memory with the precisely defined bits of digital data stored in databases and processed by computer chips. Governed by highly variable biological signals, chemical, electrical, and genetic, every aspect of human memory—the way it’s formed, maintained, connected, recalled—has almost infinite gradations. Computer memory exists as simple binary bits—ones and zeros—that are processed through fixed circuits, which can be either open or closed but nothing in between.

An immortal’s memory is quite apt at recalling people who have pissed them off.” Everyone laughed, while Hades glanced over at me. Touché, old friend, I thought. Touché.

Payne sought clarification. “Vertical or horizontal?” “Horizontal, of course.” “Sorry but I can’t help you.” “Will you pipe down for a minute? Naturally she was dead since I work at a cemetery. Her face struck a chord though. So, I rummaged around in the old Rory memory bank, and Emily is what rings a bell. Didn’t we go to school with an Emily? Tenth or eleventh grade, if I recall it correctly.