I Remember When... Or Do I?

Memory's a strange thing.

I just have to start a chat with my own mother to realize that, about shared events, what I remember is far from what she remembers.

We select our own version of any event, and we transform it, making it nicer with our rose-tinted glasses, or making it more horrible. Then, the memory's preserved, kept, worshipped... and it becomes the truth.

I just have to mention childhood memories to my mum, and we get two different versions.

As someone who works on History, I find it properly fascinating. If my mum and I can't agree on the version of something where we both were present and participating, how can I expect the testimonies I use in my research to be accurate? In fact, I can't, and as long as we rely on a human brain (pretty stuck on the options here, I'm afraid), we'll never be able to get any fully accurate account. We can get the broad picture, but the interpretation is bound to differ, and it's both fascinating and irritating.

It's fascinating because we're only human, but it's irritating because we can never be sure of the truth (if we can't agree on simple, private events, how could we agree on bigger ones?).

My work, articles and research (particularly the longest one, my PhD thesis) - everything's based on data and testimonies, and how could we rely on that? Either we're dealing with an individual, or individuals, who's seen something and who's telling it the way he or she remembers it, or we're dealing with prior historians who've made choices when they wrote their accounts.

My PhD thesis was on a very obscure event in European history; it's something that has cultural consequences even now. You have people today believing that certain things happened, centuries ago, but what's absolutely extraordinary is that, even in the accounts of the time, there's one full day that was never reported in any form, to any historian. A few years later, the gap was filled with legend, and that legend became the truth. I loved working on that subject because it was never boring, and it showed how History is selective.

We'd like to believe that we're trying to be neutral, but we can never be. We can't be fully accurate, but we can hope that, in History at least, we'll select the bigger image (otherwise we're dealing with mere propaganda).

In our own lives, we'll have to hope that we're keeping the most accurate memory about one event, but if I'm to judge this according to my own experience, it's a failure. Bad things look gloomy and remain so, while good things are seen with rose-tinted glasses and we cherish the pastel and fluffy memory that becomes roser and fluffier with time.

The human brain is quite fascinating... if disturbing (and irritating sometimes).