Hope and Memory

Dear Liisa,

I've actually gotten rather comfortable with memories, which may be surprising given my history. As a child I could get myself worked up over the end of anything - saying to myself, "Well, this is the last morning bus ride of my third grade life..." and sniffling a bit. But I'm a little better now. It's always a bit sad when things end, and especially when you have to leave people behind that you will never see again, but I'm a little better at packing the memories away. For something new to come after, something must end, after all, and the memories - they're safe in my heart, and I collect them like treasures. Pictures and mementos don't hurt either.

Of course, this approach only works if you have your memory, and I am also scared of these things... Alzheimers and Amnesia and such. They almost seem worse than death... especially if they come, as they often do, late in life. I think I'd rather just die, though to tell the truth, I'm not always optimistic about what happens after death. I think I would be content to live in my memories, perhaps to relive my life again and again. Some say that memories are what make a soul rich, perhaps that is what such a thing means.

But death is frightening too, isn't it? The other day I ran into a rather terrifying line of reasoning that took me a while to answer with any sort of hopefulness. I was thinking about ghosts and their transparent fingers, the way they slide through life without feeling. If they cannot feel without fingers, how can a ghost see without eyes? How can one hear without ears? How can one even think, without a mind? How can one remember? And if one does not remember, did one ever really live?

The more we learn about the mind, the less room there seems to be for anything else inside of it, anything resembling a soul, anything that endures. Hope was easier when these things were a mystery. Still, I can't help but think that it's possible that our senses are only a very physical and earthly extension of senses we might have more easily on some other, higher plane of existence - that when we live inside our bodies it is like slipping a hand into a glove or watching a sonar graph, that when we die we recede from these things just as easily...

Nothing terrifies me more than the alternative, that what follows death is nothingness, like before our births. I have heard older people, in their sixties and so on, say that they are beginning to understand that life has an ending, and are content with it... they feel finished and used up. I hope that if nothing follows life that I come to such a state before the end, but I despair of ever doing so. Right now I am so greedy for life... I want to see and taste and feel and experience so many thousands of things - anything and everything.

And I love all my memories, and fiercely hoard them. The experiences may be good or bad or even embarrassing, but the memories are lovely all the same. Sometimes you can feel a memory in the making, and other times the most precious memories spring from the most mundane things, the things you take for granted until years later, remembering long summer nights playing flashlight tag or sunlight on snow on a winter morning. And such memories can flare up and make themselves felt again, as if they never really left, when a smell or a turn of the light takes your heart back again.

And I can't help but think of dreams, in which there is often a long and extensive back-story woven into the detail. We remember it all naturally and perfectly while asleep, and upon waking only remember what was remembered, if that makes any sense. Do you ever wonder if your existence is only actually this very moment, and everything before that you think you remember is nothing more than a memory?

But which is more important, the memory or the truth? Would you rather remember a thousand rich falsehoods or forget a lifetime of experience?




Ha! You've written me such nice emails lately, filled with wonderful and intriguing detail. I've gone and repaid you with nothing but ignorant philosophy... (And I didn't even get to the religious aspects of any of this...) Sorry, my dear... I will write you all about school and teachers and such in my next email. I hope this made you feel a little big better and then a lot worse and then a tad bit hopeful about that strange thing we call memory...

- Miranda