Once upon a time, this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.
Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.
Memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.
It's so necessary to try and record the cultural memory of people. To set it down for generations to come. To better understand where we are headed. The problem is, a good portion of what we choose to remember is about willed forgetting. Which we all do, I believe, to protect ourselves from what is too difficult.
Human memory is short and terribly fickle.
One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.
Memory tempers prosperity, mitigates adversity, controls youth, and delights old age.
Memory narrativises itself.
Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition.
We're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, or invention, or insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least.