Letter #5: Vast is the Power of Memory

The Mind can't Contain Itself

Filial WigWamic Entity,

“Life must be lived forwards but it can only be understood backwards.” So the Christian existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard used to tell me. And I used to say, “Soren, keep it down, I’m trying to watch the game.”

But he had a point, and so do you. The entire Road to Emmaus story is about understanding backwards, about memory and its ability to make the sporadic fragments of experience whole and meaningful. Jesus arrives at the end of Israel’s Old Testament history to say: “Look back, and you will find it was all about my coming.” Even his prophesies aren’t meant to warn us about the future, but only to confirm his identity once they have been fulfilled and we can understand them backwards (John 16:4).

The subject of memory is so immense, it’s easy to get lost in high-falutin’ philosophy. Which is fine if you’re a Falutin who wants to get high. But as an eminently practical man, I just want to make a couple of points.

Memory is the core of identity. We are what we are because of how we hold within us what we’ve been. This is true not just of individuals but of cultures too. Only by working toward a true understanding of our triumphs and traumas and traditions can we move forward as better selves. The iconoclasts — the radicals who pull down statues thinking they can break free from the sins of history — create not innocence but ignorance. In attacking the traditions that shaped them, they demolish the origins of their ideas, the very source of their righteous anger. They are condemned to clothe their cultural nakedness in second-hand barbarities. Destroy the past and you destroy the core of your being.

This may be why Socrates used to tell me, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Though I used to tell him, “Socrates, keep it down. Kierkegaard is trying to watch the game.”

One other thing. The memory unifies the self, but it can’t contain the self that remembers. Which hints at the fact that the unity of our minds has a life and source in a greater mind than our own.

So we are back on the Road to Emmaus, walking with the only true guide to both our history and our individual past.

This is probably why St. Augustine used to say to me, “Vast… is the power of memory… Even though this is a power of my own mind, it is what I am, still I cannot take it all in. The mind is too limited to contain itself.”

Really, I think I need to start hanging out at a quieter sports bar.

Yer loving,

Dad