In comparison with a future we don’t want to inhabit, what has already happened feels domesticated – practically bearable. Especially during times dominated by the dull fear of the unknown. I think the global obsession with memory is simply the foundation, the essential precondition for a different cult: the religion of the past, as we knew it in olden times a little splinter of the golden age, proof of the fact ‘that things were better back then.’ The subjectivity and selectiveness of memory means we can fix on a historical ‘excerpt’ which has nothing in common with history itself – there will be people out there for whom the 1930s were a lost paradise of innocence and permanence. Eyewitness evidence is notoriously shaky. Memories are never set in stone and our perspective on them can change with time. Reading In Memory of Memory made me think about how we consider ours and our relatives’ recollections not only of far-off things, but also of more recent events that we have lived through.
0 kommentar(er)
