Do you need a time machine?
As you get older, you understand…
We are a time machine; forward in anxiety We are going; shudders, joys, back in sorrow…
But I can’t remember if these are my words or what I remember from a novel hero.
***
Two-year-old Jean is in a stroller.
His nanny took him to the Champs Elysées. A man tries to kidnap Jean. The nanny resists. The man rakes the nanny’s face. When the crowd intervenes and the police arrive, the man runs away.
Jean remembers all this down to the smallest detail.
I call Jean, the famous name of child education and one of the fathers of experimental psychology. Jean Piaget.
So what happened next, do you think?
Years later, the nanny writes a letter stating that she wants to confess her sins. He states that he made up the kidnapping incident, made the nail marks on his face himself, and that he would return the watch that Piaget’s family gave as a gift due to his heroic behavior.
Piaget remembers the event “of your memory memory” says; behind a mighty lie the moment he left…
What is said in the family turns into a memory, but how it is remembered vividly.
***
last sunday “Your earliest memory what age is it?” I asked.
I saw that my readers’ own experiences also overlap with scientific findings; well essential memories three and a half It starts after age.
I should mark it here…
well memory without language It isn’t happening.
When the language gains a sufficiently developed character, it seems as if the memories start to pile up…
Images and exceptional events are important…
But there are also scents.
The memory is caught in the smell, it records.
Smell can also clutter up the nooks and crannies of memory like a drawer.
of the ancients “Smell is a bearer memory” It’s not in vain that he said…
***
Whether it belongs to the early ages or to the later periods…
What we remember most strongly alright?
That’s the thing about it, it doesn’t come to the lab.
We remember the shocking events, that’s for sure!
It’s also hard to forget.
But think about it…
In the long film strip we call our memories, there are so many things whose meaning and place are uncertain…
Cees Nooteboom’s quote comes to mind: “Memory goes wherever it wants. It’s like a dog sitting there.”
The things we struggled to remember could not reach the consistency we wanted; the pallor of color, taste which of us does not know!
.
