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Memory ensures the relevance of the past and places us within time, thus becoming our chronological and existential consciousness.
The mechanism of memory expresses our temperament and is determined by it. Some retrieve images of joy from the past, and others images of pain, without anyone being sure that these are solely events and not reflections of the joy and pain each carries within.
The past is rewritten daily by ourselves. The attempt to capture it within the pages of a diary or a photo album is just a spasmodic and arbitrary collection of fleeting moments, which, severed from the trunk of life, lose their meaning within the flow of it, to gain that which our own need attributes to them.
Photographs cease to depict past time. Their photographic time is the present as a starting point and an occasion for memory. Our entire childhood can be enclosed in a photographic image, as it weaves its own stories, true or false.
While memory may ensure the consciousness of the present, the latter would be uninhabitable without the presence of oblivion, which liberates us from the weight of the past's constant presence. The ability of humans to choose between memory, oblivion, or their distortion constitutes an element of freedom and is a basic right that defensively armors them against time.
However, it seems that science, increasingly succumbing to the allure of its unlimited possibilities, has once again come to deprive us of a freedom, condemning us to live under a permanently lit spotlight that illuminates the shadows of our past.
A small news item in the newspapers recently informed us about the construction of a microchip that could accompany us for life, recording everything we learn and do, so that we can have at every moment a faithful image of our past life. Scientists have even estimated that on average the information about our life would not exceed ten million megabytes. A gigantic memory that fits a small life. What remains for us is to fill our hard drive."
Plato Rivellis