I’ve been having memory problems lately. You know the feeling where you go into a room and forget why? I’ve been feeling that a lot. To mark this new phase in my life, I bought The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa.
It was an interesting read. Imagine going through life forgetting things. How do you build a consistent narrative? I think the idea is that you can’t. Nobody really does. We create our narrative based on how we feel and what we want. These stories come together to form our internal lives and shape how we respond to the world around us. Not remembering recent things means every storyline is created again, without much influence from what came before. This is not something to be upset about. “Recent” is a subjective term. At some point, all of us forget details.
I think the most interesting part of this shows up in learning math. If something truly makes sense to me, I am not relying on memory. The concepts are just there. The same applies to biology. So when it comes to functioning at my job and pursuing my hobbies, I am not really affected. I wonder why that is. Maybe it is time to take a deeper look into memory.
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