Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
Interpretation
Our memories gain clarity and meaning when expressed through language. Language shapes our perception of time and experience.
Siri Hustvedt's quote suggests that our memories are often disjointed and lack a clear narrative until we articulate them in words. It emphasizes the idea that language not only serves as a tool for communication but also plays a crucial role in structuring our understanding of time and our experiences, with syntax and tense guiding how we relate past events to the present.
In practice
In a seminar discussing the relationship between memory and language.
Perception plays a vital role in the diagnosis of bipolar illness. Symptoms are perceived through the categories of psychiatric medicine at a given moment in history, categories which are continually shifting and being named or renamed.
All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.
I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.
under our love making I felt a bleakness that couldnt be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed
People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.
The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.
I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying, abruptly revealed evidence of the scheme in action. That the schemes could destroy the works of man might be a personal regret but remained, in the larger picture I had come to recognize, a matter of abiding indifference. No eye was on the sparrow. No eye was watching me.
When you achieve equality, and freedom, and fairness, it's not because I grant it to you. It's because you fought for it because it is your right. This is not about benevolence or charity; it is about every human being's God-given right.
Two sentiments alone suffice for man, were he to live the age of the rocks - love, and the contemplation of the Deity.
I fear that too many have sadly surrendered their agency to the adversary and are saying by their conduct, 'I care more about satisfying my own desires than I do about bearing the Savior's power to bless others.'
I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness to make sure it continues into the future.
A criminal remains a criminal whether he uses a convict's suit or a monarch's crown.
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