In Search of Lost Memory

Internet outrage of the day: controversy about a California high-school-mascot replacement! Have you heard the story? No? Well, you won’t hear it here, alas. I just discovered that I managed to defeat my word-processing program’s backup protocols and have permanently overwritten the column that is due in three hours.

When I realized this, I sighed and thought, Well, I remember what I said. Just redo it from memory.

And it was awful. Whatever spirit had animated the first version, it had evaporated. Couldn’t remember what I wrote. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had access to our previous brain states and could revisit them when necessary? You lose your car keys and just fire up the Mr. Memory machine, rewind to 6:30 yesterday evening when you came home, put the electrode up your nose . . . ah. Jacket pocket, hall closet.

That’s silly, you say. First of all, when they come up with memory storage-and-reply devices, they will not have gendered names. Second, the very idea is ridiculous. Really? I just read an article at medicalxpress.com discussing remarkable advances in brain–computer interfaces. It quotes Elon Musk. “In the future you will be able to save and replay memories,” he said at a Neuralink event in 2020. “You could potentially download them into a new body or into a robot body.”

Thanks, but no. For all we know future software updates will disable anything that smacks of old-think or incorrect opinions. Error: The views held by this robot shell of Grandpa are no longer compatible with modern hardware and cannot be displayed.

The problem with downloading and saving your memories is obvious: You really don’t want a complete and accurate record of the way things went. The human ability to retroactively edit experiences and behaviors is remarkable, and it’s one of the things that let us go about our day without being crippled by regret and embarrassment. Now and then an ancient memory of something stupid I did will surface, and rather than examine it for lessons I do the human thing and stuff that mangy cat right back into the coffee can.

Our ability to rework memory also makes us more interesting people. I’m pretty sure that when I was eleven and acting in a North Dakota State University performance of Ah, Wilderness!, I tripped during the last rehearsal and went through a piece of scenery. I was supposed to run onstage, grab my cap from a hat stand, go up a small flight of stairs, and stop when my offstage mother called me. I stubbed my toe and went headfirst through the door, smashing it to pieces. I practiced the movement again and again before the curtain went up, because I was terrified of repeating the mistake. My career would be over at age eleven, my good name in Fargo sullied, and people on the street would jeer: There’s the lad who ruined a Eugene O’Neill drama for everyone! Hey, Stumblefoot, what’s next, The Iceman Trippeth?

To which I would shout, “It was a comedy, not a drama, a rare piece of lightheartedness to contrast with the rest of O’Neill’s oeuvre, and it was an accident!” And then run home, face hot with tears.

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I did not trip on opening night. I also did not audition for another play for 54 years, perhaps because in the back of my mind I was worried about hitting the front of my mind on something. That’s how I remember it, anyway. If I had access to what actually happened, I might see that I just stumbled a bit, maybe grabbed the handle too hard, but did not actually fly through the door. I’d see that I’d embellished the episode, ending up with a set-piece anecdote.

And then I’d start to wonder whether maybe I’d oversold a few other moments in life for the sake of dinner-conversation tales.

Naaaah, I’m sure that’s the only one.

But what about happy memories? Wouldn’t you like to replay those? Depends. One of my earliest memories consists of bounding out of bed at the farmhouse and heading to the kitchen for breakfast. Fresh June, bright sun, the joy of being five with the merry expanse of a summer day ahead. Let’s say I get to interrogate the details and find out that Grandma was actually cross with Grandpa because he’d spilled coffee on her freshly laundered tablecloth, and the Hired Man forking in the flapjacks gave me an evil leer because he was, in fact, an itinerant deviant, and Grandpa would later find him pleasuring himself with a chicken and walk him to the main road at the point of a rifle.

Maybe just stick with “It’s June and I’m happy.” Isn’t that enough? Well, you might ask, wouldn’t you want to replay other happy moments? The birth of your daughter, and the moment you wrote the last check for college? And maybe some stuff in between?

Absolutely not. Having access to all your memories debases their most important value: the unique and unrepeatable essence of every moment of life.

I remember a lot. I have pictures and video. Those are shadows and suggestions, remnant impressions, and that’s enough. The longer you live, the more the whole retrospective enterprise becomes tinged with bittersweet pleasure. Things recede until you’re nostalgic for previous bouts of nostalgia. Recollections can burden you with the quantity of joy you had — and while this should bring gratitude, in a way you’re also grateful for forgetting, lest you constantly be in a reverie instead of engaging with the day.

Oh, the mascot thing? They swapped out a Minuteman for a bear. It wasn’t inclusive and, horrors, he had a gun. I don’t approve. The end.