Both the movies "Atonement" and "The Kite Runners" are pretty exclusively about redemption and remorse, dragging me through the stories of bitter memory. As we grow older, like the English Briony Tallis or the Afghan Amir, we leave behind each one of us a tail – a tail that we feel ashamed and would like to redeem badly.
The memory a dog killed by our cars reminds us our reckless driving. The dirty words we used when we were angry with our classmate haunt us for months, if not years.
Pretty hurtful and callous, eh? Yet a deeper look might lead you to rethink your answers. Whilst it's not hard to see why the tail of this sort is bothering us, we should be fine as long as we can shut down the bitter memory ourselves. After all, what counts? The memory that we conjure up ourselves. As long as we learn the trick not to bring up the bitter memory, life is not that difficult.
If you think about it, it is the others' memory that really bothers us. We will never know for sure whether our classmates will forget (or forgive) the dirty words we said. We may control what we remember and then sleep unscathed. And that was good. But we have no rights whatsoever how other people remember us. Amir could have deceived himself into thinking he had remembered nothing, but he was unable to stand the goddamn fact that Hassan was woefully stricken by the bitter memory.
I guarantee you a Nobel Prize if anyone of you can come up with a brainwashing "eraser". And, don’t forget to save one eraser for me. Please.
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- KM Chow
- Hong Kong
- KM Chow is a young chap who is learning to show respect for the other person's opinion.
2 comments:
Dear KM,
Thanks for your wonderful sharing. In epilepsy surgery, we may sometimes resect a left or right temporal lobe. The effect on memory, however, is different for each side, as resecting the left temporal lobe will impair more verbal memory whereas resecting the right temporal lobe will take away more figurative memory. It would be interesting if, one day, we may find out more specific areas of brain which are responsible for "emotional memory", etc so that we'll know how best to plan our surgery and to savage treasurable memories.
Regards,
Howan
Memory is really a strange thing.
Not only we can't control other's memory, often time it is also very difficult to shut down our own memory. When we have some unwanted memory, we try to come up some other stuff to overwrite it. It may work for a while, until we see a picture or hear a song, our memory can come all right back.
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