A Fight To Remember

As I write, my sister is rooting through our copious family photo stash. We have hundreds, if not thousands, of the things - the result of a camera happy mother. Because of this I am fully aware of what I looked like at every stage of my childhood, something that certainly would've been lost in the vast inaccessible badlands of my memory. People value family photos highly; many list them as the one thing that they'd save from a house fire. To lose them, they say, would be to lose priceless memories. Hang on a second. Losing memories? Implying that they don't actually remember those events in the first place. Are we capitulating our natural memory capacity in favour of an artificial alternative? As home videos and digital photos proliferate we need to remember less and less - external sources do a better job. Or so we think. Sure, these media duplicate exactly what was there - but do they, in spite of that, really tell a true story? They miss a whole dimension which is as much part of reality as what our eyes see. The feel of our bodies, our thought and impressions, the smells that surrounded us, the emotions that coursed through our veins - all these are stripped away. Vision is paraded, paupered and naked, before us and we call it memory. When writing came to maturity we lost our ability to remember words - now we are, much more tragically, losing our capacity to recall events. We have become reliant on outside sources, but I fear that they will prove a broken reed - an ineffective prop that will injure us as it collapses. Among the many things we must now fight for that we've long taken for granted, the ability to reexperience our past in all its multilayered richness is one of the most vital.