what is the shape of a memory?
is it solid? can it be held in our hands, handed down from person to person, where it can be polished or shattered?
or is it liquid, seeping through the cracks in everyday daydreaming, taking the shape of its container? one may even purport a gaseous state: an ephemeral mist that suffuses space, not unlike scent, impossible to grasp but intensely haunting.
fragments of self
when i think back to my childhood, it's hard to visualize the exact setting or world i allude to: i just see a hazy scene, like a movie set, where the world is set up for that moment and nothing else.
yet memory acts as the glue of the self. each fragment - fleeting images, ethereal feelings, pivotal life events - thread together to sustain our identity over time. it provides the continuity of experiences we carry with us.1
humans are narrative creatures, and our identities rely on these constructed narratives, a story of who we are today shaped by core memories and chosen characters. it’s our past that makes us: the sting of a bruised knee when i toppled off my bike in middle school, the unbearable lightness in my heart when i first wandered to the city fair.
and we keep portals to our past with the artifacts we keep, vibrant in their texture and color. sepia-toned sadness seeps into worn photos of estranged friends. prismatic joy pulsates from the trophies we’ve accumulated. forgotten handwriting scrawled on notebook paper reveal prior seasons of yearning.
surrogate memory
if you could have perfect memory, would you take it?
it’s a faustian wager we buy into, unconsciously. we live in an age where all of our experiences have been neatly stored in our camera roll. pics or it didn’t happen - where the mere existence of a moment demands capture.
memory, in computer science, has been flattened to mean storage, with limits defined by megabytes of RAM or the rows of a cloud datacenter in Virginia. moments are definitively solid and durable: flattened into two dimensions, four-digit pixel counts.
fb notifications aggressively ping me, resurfacing images of a random hometown peer from seven years ago: “celebrate your milestone: seven years of friendship!” gphotos and icloud do the same, dredging up what their algorithms deem as core memories - embarrassing selfies or reminders of people no longer in our lives.
technology has eliminated the cognitive load remembering. we don’t have to remember old coworkers thanks to linkedin; we can save our “favorite” songs without blinking using spotify; we can purchase items without tracking them thanks to amazon. there exists a future where we outsource memory entirely, through chatbots that remember for us, assistants tailored to your learned preferences.
but in the practical sense, perfect recall is not without its thorns. imagine reliving every heartbreak and tragedy and failure, without the natural fade that softens pain. imagine an unrelenting record of every interaction, where every conflict is catalogued and deeply held.
lossy recall
when you ask me to recall my past, it’s not the moments that have been posted to death on my socials, or the images of the eiffel tower and european mountains rotting in the cells of my bloated camera roll.
it’s the intense feelings from childhood, from summers growing up in boredom. i’ll be the first to admit i’m not the best at retelling stories. when i look back, details-faces-names blend together. but it’s the filtered feels i recall vividly, even as they have numbed over time.
human memory is selective by evolution, shaping identity by what it chooses to preserve and what it allows to let go.
there’s this piece by ken liu about this:
I can’t remember the dress she wore or what she had bought; I can’t remember what we did for the rest of that afternoon; I can’t re-create the exact timbre of her voice or the precise shapes of her features, the lines at the corners of her mouth or the name of her perfume. I only remember the way sunlight through the kitchen window glinted from her forearm, an arc as lovely as her smile…
Time’s arrow is the loss of fidelity in compression. A sketch, not a photograph. A memory is a re-creation, precious because it is both more and less than the original.
memory is ephemeral, memory escapes us, memory resists a container.
let me be clear: memory isn’t storage, it’s essence.
it is a fundamentally human way of seeing and meaning-making. even as social media archives our lives, it cannot preserve the feelings we experience and the fragment of self carried in the haze of recollection. it’s just as much about what we forget as what we remember: years after a moment evaporates, details fade but the feelings remain. it’s lossy by design - forgetting is a feature, not a bug.
our perspectives color the way we internalize an event, and it manifests in the emotional pangs when we try to recall it. it’s these moments that preserve a piece of who we were and who we have become. memory cannot be held in our hands - it exists as the self that lives in the in-between.
thank you to all the new folks who joined my newsletter recently :)
sharing a playlist that feels intensely nostalgic and a reminder of home:
from John Locke
ahh i love this line so much: “memory isn’t storage, it’s essence. “
have you read The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by ted chiang? you would love it