The past is only an unreliable memory held in the present. The future is only a projection of our present conceptions. The present itself vanishes as soon as we try to grasp it. So why bother with attempting to establish an illusion of solid ground?
When you're dealing with the world of dreams, the psyche, and potential of a human mind, there has to be emotional stakes. You have to deal with issues of memory and desire.
Touch has a memory. O say, love say, What can I do to kill it and be free In my old liberty?
Through the power that memory gives us of thinking, feeling, imagining our way back through time we can at long last finally finish with the past in the sense of removing its power to hurt us and other people and to stunt our growth as human beings.
The sharpest memory of our old-fashioned Christmas eve is my mother's hand making sure I was settled in bed.
Tell me the tales that to me were so dear, Long, long ago, long, long ago.
You never know how much a man can't remember until he is called as a witness.
After illuminating the work of Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Louise Bourgeois, Balthus, and other modern artists, Mieke Bal again demonstrates her extraordinary flair for cultural criticism in taking on the work of Doris Salcedo, exploring the philosophical and aesthetic stakes of this committed political art and the relation between beauty, violence, and memory. A tour de force.
To conjure a particular knowledge you visualize an architectural structure and then you walk around and see the details that then bring back the words or the poetry or the lines of thought. Memory's going extinct because we rely on machines and copies and so on. The idea of working with structures that conjure dreams, personages, history, time, that can be contained in this way as you walk through your mind, is a challenge.
In science one must search for ideas. If there are no ideas, there is no science. A knowledge of facts is only valuable in so far as facts conceal ideas: facts without ideas are just the sweepings of the brain and the memory.
For all our penny-wisdom, for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted that all men have sublime thoughts; that all men value the few real hours of life; they love to be heard; they love to be caught up into the vision of principles. We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had, in the dreary years of routine and of sin, with souls that made our souls wiser; that spoke what we thought; that told us what we knew; that gave us leave to be what we only were.
We should have stories in common, I found myself thinking. We should have stories, and jokes no one understands, and memories that we know will stay alive because neither of us will let the other forget.
My memories of literary agenting are of a very happy time and there are surprising reminders of it coming back now.
In 1970 I felt so lonely that I could not give; now I feel so joyful that giving seems easy. I hope that the day will come when the memory of my present joy will give me the strength to keep giving even when loneliness gnaws at my heart.
I feel that there is no such thing as ultimate forgetting; traces once impressed upon the memory are indestructible.
There is a way to look at the past. Don't hide from it. It will not catch you if you don't repeat it.
I can understand that memory must be selective, else it would choke on the glut of experience. What I cannot understand is why it selects what it does.
To begin with, our perception of the world is deformed, incomplete. Then our memory is selective.
Sleep and meditation are key. Natural sleep for 8 hours will help remove toxins from the body, help consolidate memory, create order from chaos. Sleep activates good hormones that are associated with rejuvenation and slowing down the ageing process.
Photography mirrored the [nineteenth century] will towards rigor, towards defining details, the need for miniscule description, the long-distance optics, for technology at the service of truth, for concepts of credibility, of objectivity, the need to archive, for the consolidation of institutions like the museum, in short, towards a need to control memory.
