I’ve always found it interesting to read over old things that I’ve written. It’s true that I tend toward a certain obsession over memory: a penchant for nostalgia, or a longing for unity of self. An unrealistic desire. Like St. Augustine writing his Confessions, as I try to make sense of my life what I become aware of is its utter fragmentation: how often my longings shift, how little I remember, how many thousands of mental states my consciousness flits through. We are not rational beings, we humans. We don’t accrue information on a tape, like a computer. What we remember depends on what we are now, what we need now, what we desire now. We perceive the past through the same muddied lens with which we perceive the present; we are always bound to a single moment in time.

(When I finish this Ph.D., there are two books I would like to write. One is a history of memory, or rather a history of the desire to remember, beginning with Heraclitus’s stream and following it, as it were, through Augustine, the so-called Dark Ages, Proust, Freud, and finally to modern neurology and its strange obsession with amnesia. The other, which I suspect will be much more difficult to write, is a novel about humans and robots – robots with souls, but an entirely different perception of time.)

Umberto Eco quotes Wittgenstein near the end of The Name of the Rose (there it is in appropriately anachronistic Middle German): “Er muss sozusagen die Leiter wegwerfen, nachdem er auf ihr hinaufgestiegen ist” (he must, so to speak, throw away the ladder once he has climbed it). Which is to say that memory is only a tool: it is not a thing in and of itself, to be hoarded or traded, but the means by which we perceive the world. Or to put it another way, what we call memory is merely an abstract, static knowledge of the world, but true memory goes down to the bone: it grafts itself into your life, it changes the way you smile. No, it is the way you smile, the way you play a tune, the things you say when someone is hurt.

I’m not so concerned any more with memory, or with any abstract system. I want to see rightly. I’m not sure when that changed, except perhaps when I read what Augustine says in the Confessions, when he too comes at last to admit that neither his memory nor his reason can hold him together: “A man is an abyss, but you, O God, know every part of him.”