2002-12-30 23:26:48尚未設定
Memory--A Letter To Myself
Dear Terrence,
Memory can not be understood without a mathematical apporach. The fundamental given is the ratio between the amount of time in the lived life and the amount of time from that life that is stored in memory. No one has ever tired to caculate that ratio and in fact there exists no technique for doing so; yet without much risk of error I could assum that memory retains no more than a millionth, a hundred-millionth, in short an utterly infinitesimal bit of the lived life. The fact too is part of the essence of man. If someone could retain in his memory everything he had experienced, if he could at any time call up any fragment of his past, he would be nothing like human beings: neither his loves nor his friendships nor his capacity to forgive or avenge would resemble ours.
We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper. But it does not count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such.
For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or our interests. We will not understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was and when it was: it can not be reconstructed.
Terrence
Memory can not be understood without a mathematical apporach. The fundamental given is the ratio between the amount of time in the lived life and the amount of time from that life that is stored in memory. No one has ever tired to caculate that ratio and in fact there exists no technique for doing so; yet without much risk of error I could assum that memory retains no more than a millionth, a hundred-millionth, in short an utterly infinitesimal bit of the lived life. The fact too is part of the essence of man. If someone could retain in his memory everything he had experienced, if he could at any time call up any fragment of his past, he would be nothing like human beings: neither his loves nor his friendships nor his capacity to forgive or avenge would resemble ours.
We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper. But it does not count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such.
For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or our interests. We will not understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was and when it was: it can not be reconstructed.
Terrence