Anthony Doerr on Memory

Memory

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.

~~Luis Bunel, My Last Sigh

Memory builds itself without any clean or objective logic: a dot here; another dot here, and plenty of dark spaces in between. What we know is always evolving, always subdividing. Remember a memory often enough and you create new memory.

Memory is a way of defying erasure.
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Nothingness is the permanent thing. Nothingness is the rule. Life is the exception.
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Where do memories go once we've lost our ability to summon them?

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What is a seed the purest kind of memory a link to ever generation that has gone before it?

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....there is no good nor bad to it at all. Every memory everyone has ever had will eventually be under water. Progress s a storm and the wings of everything are swept up in it.

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Memories, when they come, are often viscous and weak, trapped beneath distant surfaces, or caught in neurofibrillary tangles.

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A river never stops. doing, wherever you are, whatever you are doing, forgetting,sleeping, mourning, dying--the rivers are still running.

Every hour ... all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. the World is remade.

....You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.