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.
You're quite right there," he said. "I have practiced abstinence myself for years, and had my time of fasting, too, but now I find myself once more beneath the sign of Aquarius, a dark and humid constellation.
But he found that a traveller's life is one that includes much pain amidst its enjoyments. His feelings are for ever on the stretch; and when he begins to sink into repose, he finds himself obliged to quit that on which he rests in pleasure for something new, which again engages his attention, and which also he forsakes for other novelties.
How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.
A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.
The whole of life has become an institution, a madhouse in which duties are to be fulfilled not love; in which you have to behave, not be spontaneous; in which a pattern has to be followed, not the overflow of life and energy. That's why the mind thinks and decides everything, because there is danger.
We have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world.
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