Saturday, August 22, 2009

偽り

真実の反対はうそという

I spent a couple hours today looking through my parents' photo albums (which, because we have no such illusions about such things, is nothing more than a few boxes full of unmarked, undated envelopes from the photolabs) and what i found was incredibly shocking.

Unfortunately for me, there probably is no secret past to be uncovered. But the more I looked, the less I recognized and the more I realized the past cannot be true for more than one person. Events that I remember so clearly and vividly were not the events my parents or my brothers remembered. Events they remembered clearly occupied no space in my mind. During my childhood I was almost inseparable from my younger brother but we hardly share a single memory. I know one or the other of my parents or my nurse was present for many of my early memories but those moments passed as nothing that might have created a memory for them.

One set of pictures really opened my eyes: a single day trip through parts of Vermont, the only time I'd ever visited it. I think I must have been thirteen or fourteen. But of that trip i remember nothing aside from a storefront for a marble factory. I never thought much about it but when i looked at those pictures... i realized it wasn't that i hadn't remembered it, it was that it couldn't have been remembered. The entire landscape was covered in incredibly dense fog. There was really nothing to be seen.

Are memories formed by what we see or what we don't see? Is a past a thing that can be shared? Or is a random convergence of two sentient beings' hazy memories with imagined gap-filling enough to say an event actually occurred at all? Philosophy is a bitch.

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