On memory

Rhiannon, a character in Kingsley Amis’s “The Old Devils” is talking about how, in retrospect, she never really liked going to the beach, but she ‘did enjoy parts anyway’.

“You noticed things like your hair and what horrible stuff sand is but you didn't really take it in. You were wondering how it was going and what would happen next and whether you could handle it. “

A very Proustian passage. We don’t really know what we’re experiencing when we’re experiencing it. While things are coming at us, as Amis says, we’re focused on how we’re doing, what other people are likely to do next, and probably how unfair they’re being. Only later, sometimes years later, can we look at ourselves as if the person we were in the past was a character in a book; or rather, sometimes, in a case study. Then we think, well, that was really terrible wasn’t it? How could I have accepted that as normal? Or, how was I not aware how lucky I was?

I think Dostoyevsky says somewhere that man is the animal who can get used to anything. That’s why you can never really ask someone to judge his life. Are you happy? If he says yes, he may mean, yes, happier than I was yesterday. Or, happier than I was in my childhood. And there’s always the possibility that what makes him judge himself happy is and always has been below what makes you judge yourself happy. And there is, as far as I know, no way to measure happiness except through these useless personal reports.

In conclusion, human knowledge is largely illusory.