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.
There is nothing inherently fair about equalizing incomes. If the government penalizes you for working harder than somebody else, that is unfair. If you save your money but retire with the same pension as a free-spending neighbor, that is also unfair.
Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.
Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it's startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are 'We're number two!
Zero is powerful because it is infinity’s twin. They are equal and opposite, yin and_x000D_ yang. They are equally paradoxical and troubling. The biggest questions in science_x000D_ and religion are about nothingness and eternity, the void and the infinite, zero and_x000D_ infinity. The clashes over zero were the battles that shook the foundations of philosophy,_x000D_ of science, of mathematics, and of religion. Underneath every revolution lay a_x000D_ zero – and an infinity.
Big? Sure. But, he can't catch mice! So for your big tree. No use? Then plant it in the wasteland - in emptiness. Walk idly around it and rest under it's shadow. No axe or saw prepares its end. No one will ever cut it down. Useless? You should worry!.
Oh, God — the lives people try to lead. Oh, God — what a world they try to lead them in.
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