The Persistence of Memory

When I first started keeping a diary, I did it mostly out of imitation. Isaac Asimov kept one, and I liked the idea. As he wrote, “I began with the intention of recording everything of significance each day. As time went on, however… my diary became a kind of compact literary and social record of my life.” He went on: “The diaries are a series of reference books, for me, a way of finding out when something happened and in exactly what order things happen¹.” Memory, you see, is fallible. These arguments convinced me to start a diary in April 1996, which means I’ve been keeping the diary in one form or another for 28 years. Today, I wish I’d started keeping it much sooner.

I try to remember this each time I sit down to update my diary. I find myself frequently starting a day’s entry with the words, “Up at 5:30am after a (good / fair / poor) night’s sleep…” When I flip through the entries, many of them are dry accounts of my day. Over the last few years, I’ve tried to be more expressive, using the diary to argue, to debate, to ponder, and to just get stuff out of my head so that I don’t have to think about it, and yet safe in the knowledge that it is recorded somewhere. Yesterday, however, I was reminded of another reason why I keep the diary, and the value it has for me.

It rained most of the day and I felt antsy because I didn’t get out on my usual early morning walk. A break in the rain came around 9am, however, and I dashed out for an extended walk before the spigot was turned back out. Usually, I listen to a book while I walk (currently, Oranges by John McPhee), but yesterday I happened to be listening to Sirius XM’s “80s on 8” top 40 countdown for this week in 1982. I was 8 years old at the beginning of the decade and 18 when the decade ended. The music of that era forms the soundtrack to an important part of my life growing up. Music is a kind of memory-enhancer for me. Just as I can recall where I was when I read any particular book, when I hear song, it brings back clear, powerful memories. In the late spring of 1982, I was a few months past 10 years old, and living in Warwick, Rhode Island. As I walked, the songs I heard conjured memories I’d hadn’t thought about in decades.

For example, when Joan Jett’s cover of “Crimson and Clover” came on, I remembered suddenly, that I had a ’45 that had “I Love Rock-n-Roll” on one side, and “Crimson and Clover” on the opposite side. I remember that I loved the former and didn’t think much of the latter. But the thought of that album–which I’d completely forgotten about–put me in mind of my bedroom in that house in Warwick. The house was a raised ranch, and my bedroom was in southeast corner, with a window facing south over the driveway, and east over the front yard. If I tried hard, I could picture the room in a vague way. I could see where the beds were located. I could see the closet door on the north wall by east-facing window. I remembered staring at the closet door for hours the night after coming home from seeing Poltergeist in the theater. My bed was on the south wall and my brother’s bed was on the north wall. But the vision is blurred, as if looking at it through smoked glass.

How is it that I could live in that house for four years — 1,500 days! — and my memory of it be so blurry. For that matter, how is it that I can’t recall the details of any given day? I can remember, even as far back as when I lived in Somerset, New Jersey, laying in bed to take a nap, five years old perhaps, and thinking thoughts like, “When I am ten years old, I should remember this day when I was just five and wishing I was ten.” In later years, I’d lay in bed, staring at a dark ceiling and think, “When I’m fifty,” — in some inconceivably distant future — “I should remember the time when I was 15 laying here in bed, and thinking about all the years that separate these two people.”

Too many of those years are obscured by dark glass. I don’t think it is that I have forgotten, so much as I have lost the references to the place where those memories are stored. Music, in that sense, is a kind index to my memory. My diary is another index and that is its real value. Just as hearing Joan Jett conjured images of my childhood bedroom, my diary serves an index to the memory of my life. Considered in this light, I don’t feel bad about diary entries that begin by reminding me that I am an early riser. I’ve tried more and more to make the diary as broad in index as I can. Where I used to write things like, “Spent the afternoon at the pool club with the Edgertons,” I now try to be more specific, providing at least the skeleton of conversations we had, topics we discussed. Memory indices fade and I figure the more detail I provide, the more chance a future version of my will skim a page, and quickly recall the scene therein.

I suppose, in some sense, my diary is the closest I can come to backing up the index of my memory, a kind of database transaction log that can be replayed at any point. I think this is the real reason why I keep updating my diary with mundane details and brilliant insights alike. It is imperfect, but more persistent than my own memory will likely be. When I flip through the diary to a random day, I’ve forgotten most of the details of that day until I read them. Once read the, the memories come flooding back, the details fill in.

Memory is imperfect to begin with. By writing about my day on that day when events are fresh in my memory, I get them down as accurately as I can manage. Of course, there is certainly some bias that slips in. Perception itself is a kind of bias. I’m okay with that. It is the Rashoman effect. Someone reading an entry of a particular day may remember the events of that day differently from what I remembered. Usually the differences are small and meaningless, except that perhaps they help describe aspects of the observers’ (mine or theirs) personality.

Besides, my notes and diaries have given me a reputation among friends and family as someone who can answer all kinds of questions. Whether or not they like or agree with the answers my diary provides is another story.