...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.
Interpretation
Our memories are influenced by our current experiences, making them unreliable.
This quote by Jamaica Kincaid suggests that our recollections of past events are not objective truths but are instead shaped by how we perceive our present circumstances. As our current emotions and understanding evolve, they color and alter our memories, reflecting the fluid nature of our relationship with the past.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about how our current feelings shape our view of past relationships.
Something settiled inside me, something heavy and hard. It stayed there, and i could not think of one thing to make it go away. I thought, So this must be living, this must be the beginning of the time people later refer to as 'years ago, when I was young'.
Gardeners (or just plain simple writers who write about the garden) always have something they like intensely and in particular, right at the moment you engage them in the reality of the borders they cultivate, the space in the garden they occupy at any moment, they like in particular this, or they like in particular that.
I read about writers who have routines. They write at certain times of the day. I can't do that. I am always writing-but in my head.
I have no credentials. I have no money. I literally come from a poor place. I was a servant. I dropped out of college. The next thing you know I'm writing for the 'New Yorker,' I have this sort of life, and it must seem annoying to people.
I didn't think of myself as an outsider because of my race because... where I grew up I was the same race as almost everyone else... It is true that I noticed things that no one else seemed to notice. And I think only people who are outsiders do this.
I come from a little island with the Caribbean Sea on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. I come from, really, nowhere, and for me, the fiction and the nonfiction, creative or otherwise, all come from the same place.
Grief does not seem to me to be a choice. Whether or not you think grief has value, you will lose what matters to you. The world will break your heart. So I think weβd better look at what grief might offer us. Itβs like what Rilke says about self-doubt: it is not going to go away, and therefore you need to think about how it might become your ally.
Indeed, as any one who has ever worked among the poor knows only too well, the brotherhood of man is no mere poet's dream, it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.
You dislike the emancipation proclamation; and, perhaps, would have it retracted. You say it is unconstitutional - I think differently.
A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.
Blind nature will nearly always select the most probable, but man can let the most improbable become actual.
When people do not dread authorities, then a greater dread descends.
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