Category: Memory
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One Reason the Present Matters
The present is the matter of future memories. So live that one's memories will not be regrets.
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A Use for Ageing
Can I come to see myself as others see me? One way is by ageing: I become other than myself. The old man truly bent on self-knowledge can become as objective about his younger selves as he is about his contemporaries if he so desires. But he had better have an honest journal or diary…
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Victor Davis Hanson on Joan Baez and Abolitio Memoriae
In Our War Against Memory, Hanson writes (hyperlinks added), How about progressive icon Joan Baez? Should the Sixties folksinger seek forgiveness from us for reviving her career in the early 1970s with the big money-making hit “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”— her version of The Band’s sympathetic ode to the tragedy of a…
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Why Do We Remember the Dead?
One reason, the best reason, is to keep ourselves face-to-face with the reality of death. To live well is to live in the truth, without evasion. Trans-humanist and cryonic fantasies aside, death cannot be evaded. We remember the dead, then, for our own spiritual benefit. Where they are, we will be. And soon enough. But…
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How Little They Remember
A man hereabouts with a passion for chess got my number. We've become friends. He told me he took a course in the philosophy of religion way back when. I pressed him on details. All he remembers is the old professor walking into the room, flipping a switch, and intoning "Let there be light!" The…
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Time Balm
Time flattens the peaks of emotion and fills the valleys of despond. Tormentors from the past are now shades pale and insubstantial, too weak to haunt. Absence wins out over presence. One needn't work at the purgation of memory: time does the work for us.
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Why Do We Remember the Dead?
One reason, the best reason, is to keep ourselves face-to-face with the reality of death. To live well is to live in the truth, without evasion. Transhumanist and cryonic fantasies aside, death cannot be evaded. We remember the dead, then, for our own spiritual benefit. Where they are, we will be. And soon enough. But…
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Passing Strange
As dubious as are the fleeting items of this world, we yet cling to them. We even cling to the claim checks of memory's lost baggage such as the faded photographs of forgotten friends.
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Memory, Matter, Mind
Memory loss points to the materiality of mind while memory's exercise points to its immateriality. Mind is mysterious, but memorial mind is even more so, situated as it is at the crossroads of intentionality and time.
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The Straws of Memory
We grasp at the straws of memory to keep from being swept away by time's flood.
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Memory and the Operations of Reason
"Memory is necessary for all the operations of reason." (Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Krailsheimer, #651) This seems right. Consider this quick little argument against scientism, the philosophical, not scientific, view that all knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge: 1. I know by reason alone, a priori, and not by any natural-scientific means, that addition has the associative and…
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Will We Even Be Forgotten?
Not only will we be forgotten, we will be forgotten by people who never really knew us in the first place. So we will not even be forgotten. You can't remember or forget a person you never knew.
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The ‘Floaters’ of Memory
We should look past useless memories to present realities in the way we look past the floaters in our visual field. To concentrate on the detritus of memory is only to enliven what ought to be left to slumber.
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Memory, Memory Traces, and Causation
Passing a lady in the supermarket I catch a whiff of patchouli. Her scent puts me in mind of hippy-trippy Pamela from the summer of '69. An olfactory stimulus in the present causes a memory, also in the present, of an event long past, a tête-à-tête with a certain girl. How ordinary, but how strange! Suddenly…
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Memory and Happiness
It is we who supply the blood that enlivens the spectral vampires that haunt us from our past. A part of mind control is purgation of memory, and without mind control happiness is achieved with difficulty, if at all.