Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.
Interpretation
Memory is not a static archive but an active and fluid process that changes over time.
In this quote, Siri Hustvedt emphasizes that memory is not merely a collection of unchanging images and words, but rather a dynamic system that is influenced by current experiences and thoughts. Each retrieval of a memory not only brings it back but also reshapes it, illustrating that our memories are continuously evolving and are interconnected with our present realities.
In practice
In a discussion about how our upbringing affects our perception of current events, this quote illustrates the fluidity of memory.
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.
Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
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.
You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.
Being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt.
Nirvana is not the blowing out of the candle. It is the extinguishing of the flame because day is come.
Thus the right of nullification meant by Mr. Jefferson is the natural right, which all admit to be a remedy against insupportable oppression.
It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.
No nation is drunken where wine is cheap.
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