Memory, A Human Strategy, Matt Berry, aphorism 215

215
Memory is the absence of pre-existing impressions, and especially that of repeated impressions.  We do not have the impression or repetition in mind when we remember; our not having them is rather the thing.  In fact, sometimes we need to part with them before we can see them at all.
What happens?  Impressions leave gaps in the slate of mind and create a new template with which we view and re-organize the world according to our harder, more enduring past.  I say “re-organize” because we must change the world to make sense of it: the world is understood only so far as it can be forced into our “templates.”

How does this “memory” lend control?  Can I blindly grope forward, away from the bright stimuli of the present ... construct a template for the better interpretation and organization of my future ... while having no idea whatsoever what that future will be?  ... since I have no means of understanding how to make or even how to comprehend the requirements of that future except through the archaic templates of the present?




A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism



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