There was a time in my life when I believed that the mind, like a container, could hold every experience of mine; that, as some say, memories would be cataloged there, selecting the salient, worthy, and useful ones. I thought that, in the mind, we could duplicate the universe, as it appears to us, that in a nebulous and dark, boundless and mysterious space, our experiences would progressively define our own personal firmament, made of luminous fixed points, and that, throughout life, those experiences would always set the pace, just like constellations guided sailors. I’m not sure if it’s like that for every person. It was like that for me, so much so that, unaware of celestial dynamics, I suspected there would be a moment, which I imagined might coincide with the last one, when I would be pervaded by the light of awareness accumulated over the years, and that, if I were skilled enough, everything would be clear, then, due to the miraculous illumination of the sky that I myself, willingly or not, had painted.
I wouldn’t be telling the truth if I said I had some certainty now, but prejudices, more than one. In hindsight, I underestimated the power of the inexorable erosion of memory. I’ve always forgotten what I would have liked or needed to remember, even when I was young. Like water, which flows quickly over clayey terrain, escaping the will that would like to retain it, the memory of certain events and notions that I would have liked to keep for myself, even trying, I couldn’t fix it. I devised laborious stratagems, like dams and embankments, so that memories would remain impressed on me. I was forced to work hard at it, under penalty of losing them forever. I knew others didn’t have problems absorbing information for which my brain seemed impermeable, and I thought, sometimes, it was another evident limit of my intelligence. Probably it is, but it wasn’t a long-lasting concern, especially from the moment I understood that few minds are permeable to every notion, that it depends on the moment, on tastes, that, something that consoled me, information I learned without effort or took for granted, maybe wouldn’t change the world, agreed, but gave me moments of complacency, others didn’t even perceive them.
Memory, therefore, is like water. Indeed, the map of rivers and lakes is drawn mainly according to the shape of the territory, it’s true, but that’s not the important thing. When there would be enough water to cover everything, then every map would appear equal to all others. Different territories would have a lot of water in certain points and less in others, but whoever waded from above wouldn’t find differences. I think it also applies to knowledge. A knowledge that floods the mind, overwhelming every peak and every depth, makes men similar, even if very different from each other, at the origin. In knowledge, they would be equal, just like, for obvious reasons, in unawareness, they would never be similar enough. The more knowledge, the less differences.
Imagining that the way knowledge goes hand in hand with the passing of years – it applied to everyone – I saw the end of existence as the realization of a principle, that of equality among men, which throughout life has really rare occasions to be appreciated; so, pervaded by a sense of perhaps premature tranquility, I lived the sensation that knowledge was in continuous evolution, like a structure to which, dedicating all the time life grants, would still be more solid and imposing than in the meantime.
Instead, knowledge escapes. Wear, pathologies, aging, and even will, sometimes, lead us to forget even the memories we thought were indelible. This has physiological reasons already clarified, which have to do with the pre-death of brain cells, compared to the individual hosting them. In fact, we’re custodians, when old, of a brain much less receptive than when young, and, although our reasoning abilities are based especially on the dense intertwining of synapses we’ve managed to activate, and this intertwining persists even when cells are lacking, sometimes we have the unpleasant sensation that a golden bridge, which previously led us directly to a precious memory, to a mechanism studied in detail that seemed eternally imprinted in memory, could collapse at any moment, and the highway to our knowledge would be definitively precluded.
We forget the name of a person we’ve loved, or we’re surprised to explain to a friend who the actor is whose face we don’t remember, seen in a movie whose title we don’t recall, which, if we saw it again now, we would watch with renewed pleasure, given that we can’t remember how it ended. Knowledge escapes, at seventy more than at fifty, more than at twenty, like a coin that gets lost in the car, between the dashboard and the seat. Maybe it has to be like this. Maybe remembering is part of those things that are good to do when the time is right, like picking a fruit, selling on the Nasdaq, having a child. The slow agony of the universe, in its drift from its center, could, once again, serve as a reference for us. It seems eternal to us, and its vital luminous points are like they will never perish. Yet, we should imagine that it won’t always be like this, that what shines today didn’t exist once, and that, sooner or later, it will fade; that on the five points of Cassiopeia, like on our granite certainties, darkness will fall; that the North Star will cease to occupy its place on our horizon and fulfill its central role in the cosmos.
At a certain point, we realize that the experiences we treasured, our dearest memories, our culture, won’t be able to shine forever, like, if we’ve been lucky enough to light some of those lights, maybe they did once. Everything fades; the shapes and colors of the most rooted memories will fade, until the boundaries between them become imprecise, overlapping. Only in the confused ensemble of things, from a black background without dimensions, will emerge, sometimes with gentleness, like stars at dusk, sometimes suddenly, like when we snap out of a nightmare or breathe after a long apnea, what they were.
We’ll grow old progressively, perhaps having time to counterbalance our decline, elaborating shortcuts and alternative routes to our mental convolutions, and we’ll perhaps be able to do each of the things we’ve learned, which have become so much a part of us that they make every notion superfluous, which we don’t remember anyway, and every explanation useless, since we can’t give any more. Or, without noticing anything, from one day to the next, we’ll live the collapse of ourselves, losing that baggage of information that nobody, except us, would probably find so precious, but that would fill us with pain to know we’ve lost, realizing that the memory was the only link we had with a moment or a chapter of our life, whether it was photos on the hard drive or an old diary. Lost that, even life, which we’re no longer able to remember, would be as if we hadn’t lived it at all.
Maybe there are alternatives to life as we think of it, and the echo of our thoughts, the product of our emotions, will, one day, surpass ourselves, like a son survives his father. Maybe the life of a thought will float infinitely, in the infinite, like the light of a supernova reaches us, thousands of light-years away, at the peak of its splendor only because of its explosion, and we perceive its echo, its reflection, and that’s enough to fill our entire horizon. The echo of our memory will perhaps resonate, like music that only we can recognize today, long after the years of our existence, composing the very substance of the infinite universe.
Maybe, on the contrary, we’ll become oblivious envelopes of nothingness, surviving bodies of an existence terminated with the inexorable progress of our loss of consciousness, absent spectators of lives without life. Our end will assign us our rightful eternal space in the shadows, and we will be, finally, instead of stars that illuminate the path, ghosts in oblivion.