Memory
Last week we read Professor Elkins comparing it to a poem by Horace, and we talked about memory and what a tricky thing it is.
Your earliest memories have to be re-membered over and over again to reach this point, and they may have undergone some changes since then. You could carefully gather the bad threads of your life to make a covering showing how the world never treated you well, you had a horrible childhood, the boss passed you over for promotion, etc. Or you could choose to remember the happy times in your life, which is what I prefer, although not to the point where I forget the dark times of my life.
I always marveled at my friends who could remember in great detail things that happened in elementary school, when I can�t remember much at all before I was 10. Liam suggested that it might have been because they stayed in the same school and had people to remember it with them, while I was an army brat and moved on average every year until 5th grade. That�s also about when I started to keep a diary. I�ve just finished my 16th one in two months. It scares me that I need to write everything down for fear that I�ll forget it. A student lost her diary at Phling, and if that ever happened to me I don�t know what I�d do. It would be bad enough that some stranger was reading it, but I would feel like I lost those months.
Robbie, that crazy guy, has said that he wants to start at the beginning and read my diaries straight through. It always embarrasses me to go back and read what I wrote when I was 15. I think most people think that their fundamental nature has been the same throughout their life, and I was so silly and dumb, and not in a good way. And I swore all the time. I can laugh at my diary from sixth grade; perhaps the others are still too close. I asked James not to read my diary, and he said he wouldn�t, so my diary is now completely mine for the first time since I began dating. It�s freeing. I sent him the link to this, and he said he�d �check it out sometime�. I think it�s funny. If he had a diary I probably would have sneaked a peek by now, but he�s the most non-prying person I�ve ever known. That feels freeing as well, as if he�s content to let me live my life and let me reveal myself in my own time.
�I never travel without my diary; one should always have something sensational to read on the train� -The Importance of Being Earnest
