Memories

When enough time has passed, events blur, facts fade, and memories overtake reality. What we remember most vividly becomes for each of us our version of truth. We recall not the details of an experience, but its essence –some image or moment or scrap of conversation that we think discloses meaning, capture how it was. These recollections get enshrined indelibly as anecdote and case history, dramatized in the retelling as if our past lives were slides shows, either tragic or comic depending on the particular episode recalled and our current point of view.

Memories filter out subtlety, shading, complexity.

They distort and oversimplify. But they also convey a special accuracy.

It is just because we discriminate in our remembrances between the incidental and the essential that we choose to recall illuminates our most profound experiences and our truest feelings.

Through our imperfections recollections, we reveal to ourselves and to others what the past means in our lives and how it shaped our present circumstances.

Even more, in our differing memories of the same event, we grasp how much and how little we have in common with other people and other cultures.

Lovers recognize this eventually.

Countries rarely do.

(The Liberal Minds in a Conservative Age, p:23)