What Really Happened?

“I imagine the feelings of two people meeting again after many years. In the past they spent some time together, and therefore they think that they are linked by the same experiences, the same recollections. The same recollections? That’s where the misunderstanding starts: they don’t have the same recollections; each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections aren’t similar; they don’t intersect; and even in terms of quantity they are not comparable: one person remembers the other more than he is remembered; first because memory capacity varies among individuals (an explanation that each of them would at least find acceptable), but also (and this is more painful to admit) because they don’t hold the same importance for each other. When Irena saw Josef at the airport, she remembered every detail of their long-ago adventure; Josef remembered nothing. From the very first moment their encounter was based on an unjust and revolting inequality.” – Milan Kundera – Ignorance

I am fascinated by memory.

A few weeks ago I was telling my husband that I am amazed at the amount of information in my brain: Tons of words, in seven languages. Phone numbers of not only current friends but of old friends whom I haven’t even spoken to in ten years. Lyrics to songs I listen to daily and songs I haven’t heard in ages. The syntax for over fifteen computer languages that I’ve coded in. Random formulas from math and statistics classes. Flags and capitals of countries that I studied as a child. The first twenty elements of the periodic table that I was required to memorize in high school. Way too much Ottoman Empire history. Details of thousands of books, magazine articles, short stories I’ve read over the years. How to read music. User ids and passwords to my multiple accounts. Names of thousands of people I’ve met in my lifetime. Details of how a fixed income syndicate is formed and sold. Accounting formulas of every financial instrument. UNIX commands. Street names – of random cities all over the world. Subway stop names all over New York City, Brooklyn and the Bronx.

The list is too long to keep going. It just blows my mind how much information I seem to retain and how much more I can add to my current state without losing what’s already there.

Yet, in fascinating irony, I remember very little of my childhood and only sporadic instances from anything more than three years ago. A theory is that memory that isn’t recalled often tends to fade away. I don’t know if that means it’s still there and if I were to practice remembering it, it would all come back to me. Sort of like riding a bike (though I wouldn’t know since I can’t ride one): the information is all there and never disappears even if it’s not used in a long long time. I hope that to be true because it sort of saddens me to know how little I retain of my past. I guess that’s another reason to keep writing here.

Even more interestingly, when I read the above quote by Kundera, I nodded in agreement. I can easily tell that, for me, not only is it true that two people’s recollections of the same instance vary by the degree of importance they’ve put on it, but they also vary by the amount of distortion they’ve performed on the truth. It appears, I distort my past all the time. I remember events in ways that conveniently explain my actions at the time.

A few months ago, I was rereading a childhood diary because of a school essay I had to write. The entries were from the summer I turned thirteen. I realized that my writings completely mismatched my memories of that summer. While it’s possible that I was distorting my emotions in case someone read my diary, it’s more probable that I stretched the truth over the years to make the situation more melodramatic, and such, a better fit for my “poor me” conversation.

Talk about selective memory.