Slippery Memory
The editor, Jason Fry, wrote a great piece on Medium about returning to a town in Greece where he spent a summer as a child. He was taking this return trip with his parents as well as his wife and teenager. That childhood summer loomed large in his brain, and he was excited to return to the place they stayed, the restaurant they ate at, the archeological sites around town.
Except the place didn’t visually match his memories. And he realized while he was there with his parents that his memories didn’t match their memories, which didn’t match reality, too.
It’s a really interesting piece, and it’s something I think most people have experienced at some point in their life. You return to a place that held so much meaning for you that you’re certain those indelible, vivid memories in your brain must be fact. But then you arrive and doors are in wrong places or buildings are on wrong roads, and things start to mentally unravel as you realize your brain is holding on to faulty information and parading it as fact-based and unchanging as a photograph.
It made me think about how I’ve marked memory as the most important thing to hold onto, yet it’s completely unreliable. It’s such a strange idea––that we only have the vaguest understanding of what actually happened because memory is such a malleable, changing, degrading concept.
Imagine if you had a computer, and sometimes it saved your files and sometimes it changed them around without your input and sometimes they lost the files altogether. We’d never put our trust in that machine. Yet without the ability to get a reliable brain, we muddle through with memories that may or may not be accurate.
Anyway, it’s an interesting piece and it makes you think about the places you’d want to return to from your childhood; the houses or towns or parks you’d like to see again to check if they match up.
6 comments
My father had a somewhat similar experience to this author’s several years back: we took a family trip to Cork, Ireland, where my father was born and raised. At the time, he had not been back in about 30 years, and he was surprised at how much things had “changed.” Not only things that had actually changed, but also things that were likely unchanged but that he somehow remembered differently.
By my observation, he found the experience disconcerting and a little upsetting.
It’s fascinating how our brains edit memories. I have read accounts in my journals, written by myself of events that I remember very differently now.
There is a series on showtime now called The Affair. “Episodes are often separated into two parts, with each half being told from the point-of-view of a specific character. The use of this dramatic device has been used by Treem to describe The Affair as “the Rashomon of relationship dramas”.”
In the early seasons (and sometimes even now in the later seasons), the same action is replayed from two or three different POVs with vastly different “facts,” emphasis and spin. It’s food for thought … the distortions seem exaggerated, but … 🤔 hmmm.
I just had to look up “Rashomon” just now …
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon_effect
“The Rashomon effect is a term related to the notorious unreliability of eye witnesses. It describes a situation in which an event is given contradictory interpretations or descriptions by the individuals involved.”
Fascinating. I read this article with my own memories of visiting Corinth, Athens, Mycenae, etc on my own honeymoon many years ago. And I read it knowing that if I ever return, the place will not match the honeymoony feel of my memories.
I sometimes fantasize about taking my family to Japan with me as I revisit where I lived even longer ago. I wonder how anticlimactic that would be, the reality of the place vs my (unreliable) memories of the place.
Oooh, this kind of thing freaks me out a bit. Because it makes me wonder, what made my memory so different, and what if reality isn’t quite so solid? What if it was slightly different before? It takes me down a weird slippery slope. I think the places in my memories that are most interesting are places I can never revisit because they might not exist anymore — a vacant lot with a sideways wisteria tree that my friends and I hung out in in elementary school, the old playground at my elementary school, classrooms in a middle school that was turned into condos. I feel like the world changes too fast for me to revisit my childhood memories.
There’s the thing about visiting places from our memories…if they aren’t the same or how we remember it can be really upsetting. And I want to remember things the way remember them, even if it’s not as accurate. But who’s really to say what’s accurate, because even witnesses have their own POV.
The house my mom grew up in that my grandparents owned for 60+years got torn down several years ago. My husband and I lived there for a time when we were just starting out. It holds a million memories. My mom couldn’t go by there after it was torn down. It was just too hard.
I remember the last time I drove by to “visit”. We didn’t know it was getting torn down, and we went and the house was gone. All that was left was one piece of porch railing that was still intact, the rest was rubble. That was super depressing. There was so much family history of that house/that land. And it meant nothing to someone else.