We only store in memory images of value. To write about one's life is to live it twice, and the second time is both spiritual and historical.
No memoirists writes for long without experiencing an unsettling disbelief about the reliability of memory, a hunch that memory is not, after all, just memory.
Looking repeatedly into the past, you do not necessarily become fascinated with your own life, but rather with the phenomenon of memory.
Memory is, first, a captivating mystery.
Here, in memory, we live and die.
We store in memory only images of value. The value may be lost over the passage of time, but that's the implacable judgment of feeling.
Our capacity to move forward as developing beings rests on a healthy relationship with the past. Psychotherapy, that widespread method for promoting mental health, relies heavily on memory and on the ability to retrieve and organize images and events from the personal pastIf we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us—to write the first draft and then return for the second draft—we are doing the work of memory.
In memory each of us is an artist: each of us creates.
