Reflection: understanding underling themes
Memory is as changeable as the wind, yet we rely on it constantly to tell us everything we need to know about the lives we have lived and who we are as people up to this point. However we want to present ourselves, our historical knowledge of what has gone before is not at all like memory, and instead creates a discontinuity between us and the past. When we try to recall a piece of memory to the forefront of our minds, it is always marginally different, this is because memory is a fluid and every changing object. To elaborate, a quotation from Nora, "what we call memory today is not memory but already history" - Now to examine that statement in more detail, a memory that has been dormant in our minds for years can be recalled at least in part by a trigger that could be made of of virtually anything. The trigger now becomes part of the memory itself that is altered every time it is summoned. There is now multiple thread of history, there is the factual history of the moment, the recorded history of the moment, the subjective history of that moment and the subsequent replays of that combined hotchpotch. Therefore each memory that we think we have, has already been archived into the fragmented personal history each of us carry around with us. Thus making it useless if we actually remembered everything in clinical factual terms, as it wouldn't teach us about ourselves and allow us to grow as individuals.
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