The Fiction of Memory

by Daniel Goleman. 

Like perception, memory is selective.  From middle age on, most people have more reminiscences from their youth and early adult years than for the most recent years of their lives.  We have a propensity to forget parts of our lives that no longer fit with our current self images.  Successful people remember successes, forget failures.

 "Reminiscence flows more freely about the period in life that comes to define you: the time of your first date, marriage, job, child....  It's not that life is duller from 40 to 55 than from 20 to 35, but that the patterns are more stable, and so less memorable."

 I've been concerned not with time, but with its perception all along.  Past time (what other kind of time can we judge from?) is remembered by events.  Were there a way to make the patterns less stable, were one to retain the flexibility of youth throughout life, events would continue to be memorable and time would seem to pass more slowly.

 "A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present."  --Geroge Santayana

 "Past: Our cradle, not our prison, and there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past if for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition."  --Isreal Zangwill

"Life is all memory, except for the present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going." --Tennessee Williams