I have an excellent memory, a most excellent memory.
It is curious to note how fragile the memory is, even for the important times in one's life. This is, moreover, what explains the fortunate fantasy of history.
Part of the process of reading is constantly hitting the pause button, and now and then the rewind button, to ponder a word that's been chosen by the author as exquisitely as the filmmaker chooses an image or a sound editor chooses a sonic clue - the tolling of a bell in the distance to evoke memory, for instance.
My eyesight is not nearly as good. My hearing is probably going away. My memory is slipping too. But I'm still around.
What happens so often as an actor is that you retain the information about the scenes that you yourself shot and you obsess over certain scenes that you found the most challenging or interesting. The rest of the film kind of falls away in your memory or it fades a little bit.
Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.
If I'm honest, the thing I remember the most was the team mascot, Freddie the Falcon. I really remember there was a McDonald's nearby, and I remember eating a cheeseburger in the playground when the Falcon appeared. I'm not sure my dad appreciates that being my favorite memory of him playing.
We humans are still a very primitive culture, and it's one of the traps we've fallen into over the course of our lives - to forget our history. That's why George Orwell's 'Animal Farm' is so profound. It chronicles our short memory.
Everybody knows how fallible memory can sometimes be. You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain - not falsification, but a shifting.
My feeling is, when you are writing an essay, you don't make anything up. This may be a very Protestant notion, and I'm aware of the fact that memory is fallible, that if I had access to films or some absolute documentary evidence of what happened, it might look different; we get confused and fuzzy.
I've always been fascinated by memory and dreams because they are both completely our own. No one else has the same memories. No one has the same dreams.
Invented memory is a subject that fascinates me.
I learned that I never really know the true story of my guests' lives, that I have to content myself with knowing that when I'm interviewing somebody, I'm getting a combination of fact and truth and self-mythology and self-delusion and selective memory and faulty memory.
Perhaps it is because I'm a writer trained in history that I've always assumed I would make mistakes in my drafts. Historians know how faulty human memory can be.
To attain the rank of grand master of memory, you must be able to perform three seemingly superhuman feats. You have to memorize 1,000 digits in under an hour, the precise order of 10 shuffled decks of playing cards in the same amount of time, and one shuffled deck in less than two minutes. There are 36 grand masters of memory in the world.
As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.
Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!
I think that reading is always active. As a writer, you can only go so far; the reader meets you halfway, bringing his or her own experience to bear on everything you've written. What I mean is that it is not only the writer's memory that filters experience, but the reader's as well.
It is fitting that a liar should be a man of good memory.
In 'Nineteen Eighty-Four,' protagonist Winston Smith works at a propaganda department for the state called the 'Ministry of Truth,' where inconvenient news can be discarded down a 'memory hole.' Orwell was fixated on the idea that under certain governments, the past can be altered or documents rewritten.
