Winds of memory

I am overwhelmed by the power of remembrance. I do not dwell in this precise and fleeting moment, but in the accumulation of all my moments for as far back as my human memory goes. I am my past, and to deny my past is to deny myself, because the life I lived right up to this ephemeral instant defines who I am. My life is not in me; it is in what I remember, and I do not possess what I remember so much as it possesses me. It would be easy for me to pass myself off as an orphan in a bid for sympathy, but it wouldn’t be true. I am not an isolated individual, an island unto myself, cut off from my forebears; my past and present are a continuum, and it is impossible for me to find the boundary between the two. Now flies by; even as I speak, the now in which I thought I dwelt has slipped away, and the words I uttered a heartbeat ago live only in that mansion of myself called memory.

I think most of us are afraid that if we let ourselves feel our sorrow for the passing of the life that was, we will never regain our composure again. But the fear is misplaced; what should truly frighten us is the possibility that we might lose the power to recall the life we lived, which gives us our connection to ourselves. Our most terrifying diseases aren’t the ones that take our life; they’re the ones that cast us adrift on an empty sea by depriving us of our memories