Some notes I took on July 27, 1993 recently resurfaced here; they tell of a hike one evening in Torrey Pines State Reserve, a parklike strip of land along the Pacific coastline just north of San Diego, California. I wrote:

~6 pm — walked ~5 miles — from Sheraton hotel past golf course & driving range — down road (closed to cars) into nature area — to visitor center/ranger station — called home & chatted briefly — walked out to ocean along "Beach Trail" & took side path to Yucca Point — excellent view of surf — high cliffs — steep path down to beach at Flat Rock — tide high, some spray/splash — a couple of other hikers along the way — 3 rabbits (two little ones) & some birds — return via Broken Hill Trail — good views again at tops of ridges — quiet — brush burned alongside trail (South Fork). Back ~8pm

Pedestrian prose (pun intended!) ... yet those words brought to mind again the image of one of those bunnies crouched under a dry bush, of crashing surf, and of sandy paths winding among semi-desert plants. I recall looking at an arbitrary leaf on a twig at the end of a branch and telling myself, "Remember this moment!"

But to be honest, I don't recall it, at least not with any degree of detail. Life has too many moments to record them all. But I do remember the self-admonition to store that memory, and if I scratch my head I can conjure up some mental pictures of the situation. They're probably fictional. Maybe that's good enough....

TopicPersonalHistory - TopicLife - 2001-09-05

Comment

Maybe. The images you mention are probably true recall (memory), whereas most of what we commonly say we remember is actually recreated narrative of one sort or another, often based on the "memory" of previous occasions of narrative reconstruction, and so on.

Eastern philosophies deal a lot with "experience in the moment" and trying to still the incessant chatter in the head. This can be good for two reasons:

• better memory, since the experience is stored as-is sensory and emotional impressions
• better recall, since we bring up the stored impressions, unchanged, without contemporary self-commentary and editing.

Wiki is community memory with a natural mix of the narrative and as-is kind. Depend how much users refactor content :) WikiZen<a class="edit" title="Click to edit this page" rel="nofollow" href="http://zhurnaly.com/dummy.html">?</a> – Bo Leuf

(correlates: PickTwoOutOfThree, StreetSongs, FlyHigh, ...)