Remember

Something came up recently that has had me thinking a great deal about memory. What does it mean to be memorable? How do you sustain memory? How much does any of this matter?

As a creator, I will sometimes go full-on nihilistic. If our planet/solar system/galaxy/universe is ultimately doomed (okay, not for a long time, but follow along with me), then isn’t it impossible to create anything that “lasts?” But then I’ll see a six-thousand-year-old artifact in a museum or talk to someone who’s reading The Odyssey for the first time, or listen to “A Hard Day’s Night,” and I’ll think, “What’s the expiration date on this stuff? I mean, in all likelihood Hamlet won’t survive the heat death of the universe, but . . . maybe?”

Panning down from the cosmic scale, what’s the tipping point for lasting memory? My middle daughter hasn’t lived full-time in our house since she left for college seven years ago, but every time she comes back, our dog acts as though she’s been waiting at the door for her the entire time. We talk about my father’s cooking in vivid detail even though he made his last meal nearly a quarter-century ago, and I think there’s a good chance that people who never tasted a bite of one of his dishes will be talking about his Christmas feasts three generations from now. What is that? We forget so much, people come and go from our lives so often, we regularly experience things that seem so vivid to us at the time and then can’t remember the details a few weeks later. But then there are these outliers, these things that take up residence in our hearts and minds.

I think it has to do with two things. One is consistency. As far as good memories are concerned (and I’m focusing here on those), we rarely form lasting memories from things that happen in the blink of an eye. Your stomach dropping during that rollercoaster ride, that clever exchange during a staff meeting, the play of Calabrian chilies against sweet San Marzano tomatoes on a delicious pizza. All of these were probably delightful at the time, but will you really remember them three decades hence? But the amusement park that gave you and your family so much joy for years, the work team that built something exciting together, and the food at that New Haven pizzeria that you go to at every opportunity? Those things could very well be with you on your deathbed. The latter set became memorable because the feelings they evoked stayed consistent for so long.

I believe the other is inflection. Our best memories are formed by things that heighten us in some way. We remember a film long after we first saw it because of the emotion it stirred in us. When I first saw them, I might have been as entertained by Twister as I was by Field of Dreams (both released in 1989 if you’re wondering why I’m using them in the same sentence), but I couldn’t relate a single scene from the former while I can deliver chunks of dialogue verbatim from the latter. One was an engaging way to spend a few hours. The other left me feeling enhanced. I’ve lost touch with all the people I knew in high school, and most of them could walk into the room where I’m writing this right now, and I wouldn’t be able to identify them. But then there are some who just leap to mind at random times – the ones in whose presence I felt boosted in some way.

Memory is all too often a fleeting thing, and I’m not talking here about the heat death of the universe. But I think doing something memorable or being remembered is the highest achievement. Every now and then, someone will tell me how they think fondly of one of my books long after they read it or how they regularly pull out a book I edited to re-read, and I can’t think of a greater compliment. I’ll never know if my great-great grandchildren will one day share with their kids my Bolognese recipe or whether anyone will reach for a copy of my novel The Journey Home (a story about memory, by the way) from a shelf a hundred years from now and wistfully recall the final diner scene, but it is an awfully nice thing to muse on.