The Importance of Memory

After reading Nathan Nolan's short story, "Memento Mori", it got me thinking about how memory is what we use to explain almost everything we do. Consequently, that us humans really take our memory for granted. Memory is a peculiar concept and is also quite personal. Memory isn't only good for remembering things from the past but is also what we use everyday for things as simple as motivation. With this in mind, this short story truly emphasizes on the importance of memory and how under appreciated our memory is.

This man is stuck living in one lonely room for the rest of his life and through his "ten-minute life", Nolan displays how unproductive humans are with the lives they are given. Just like Earl, we too seem to repeat the same cycle day after day. Our memory allows us to remember what we do and ultimately prevents us from doing repeating mistakes or unfavorable actions from the past, which is overall a gift that we truly take for granted.

Memory provides pathways and opportunities for us to do new things and make the life we are given much more interesting. While Earl's situation does not apply to this, it can be used to emphasize that something so overlooked actually has quite a g impact on our everyday lives.

How big is the brain? Who knows—even our best efforts to calculate its capacity are flawed and meaningless.

Comments

What's So Great About Poetry?

Poetry- the unit that most students dread to learn about in their English class. But why is poetry so disliked among high school students? A few of these reasons, and that I can attest for personally, are that poetry is seen as old, it can be quite difficult to understand/interpret, and we just fail to see the point of it. However, after interpreting some poems in class, my perspective began to shift (only slightly not significantly though). While I am still not the biggest fan of poetry, I am beginning to see a different side to it. Yes, poetry is all of the negative things that I stated above (at least in my opinion) but once poetry is understood, the lesson becomes that much clearer and applicable. Understanding and correctly interpreting poetry is not only a beneficial skill to have but it also opens your eyes to a deeper understanding to things that are important in terms of culture, history, and etc. For example, poetry has effectively been used to advocate and teach about i...

Everlasting Mistakes: America Never Seems to Learn

America is essentially naive. We take what we want and we take what we have for granted. If something is going to propel our status up, whether it's for wealth, our social lives, or just out of selfishness, we don't seem to even hesitate to act. As we observe in Raymo's piece, the act of selfishness and naiveté is what drives their decisions, and eventually, will lead to their own death. The piece takes place in 1987, which is only around 25 years from when we learned how harmful cigarettes actually were. Just like in Raymo's piece when the six-year-old girl "rubbed the glowing dust on her body" not knowing that the "beautiful dust" would "damage her living cells" (Raymo 212) and kill her, our society did something quite similar and acted out of same naiveté. We did the same thing with tobacco and cigarettes and blindly rushed into using them because "they were cool" and "the new thing". Then once it was already too late...

"How Are You?" (I don't actually care though)

When we talk to people, we always seem to start our conversations with phrases such as, "how are you?" or "what's been going on with you lately?". But what is the purpose to asking these questions if the responses that we get back essentially don't mean anything to us? What are we getting from one-word answers like "good", "I'm fine", or just "yeah"? By nature, we ask these questions without actually caring about what the person answers back to us. However, I actually believe that these questions are of crucial use to us. For example, when your parents force you to meet someone like their "high school friend" and all you have to do is be polite, these questions are quite handy. You're able to fill awkward time and be polite at the same time. While it might seem cold-hearted to think this way, in reality, everyone does it. On the other hand, I'm sure there are some people who are asking these questions to ...

Your Weekly Dose of Sawyer

Search This Blog