I’d like to think I will remember this particular moon, seen from the particular angle of this balcony on this night, but if I forget, I will never know that I’ve forgotten, as is the nature of forgetting. I’ve forgotten so much—almost all I’ve seen. Experience washes over us in great waves. Memory is a drop caught in a flask, concentrated and briny, nothing like the fresh abundance from which it came.
In his book The Art of Travel, the philosopher Alain de Botton writes that memory is “an instrument of simplification and selection.” He describes how a simple phrase and idea like “a journey through an afternoon” actually elides a tremendous volume of real but mundane experiences: our senses are active at all times; our minds and emotions are working; an external world is sliding by the train/car/plane windows. We are processing information every second of that journey, but at the end we may retain only a few concrete memories—and after a little more time has passed, maybe none.
I read this after Great Circle was published, and Botton’s thinking reminded me of how, on her flight, Marian experiences discovery and loss concurrently. She has always craved more of the world, has longed to witness as much as she can. But she also knows her mind is incapable of retaining and preserving the vastness of the present. In some ways, the limitations of memory are merciful. Imagine how overwhelming it would be to remember literally everything! Instead, our experiences must fall away from us, leaving behind the strange, unreliable distillation that we call memory.
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