by Andrew Stark
Now, what about my memories, sitting in a digital storage space long after I am gone, never viewed by anyone else till the end of time? Are they like unconscious memories—no less alive than conscious ones? Or are they like unread books—dead as a doornail unless they are otherwise brought to the consciousness of readers?
They are like unread books. My digitally banked memories will consist of higher-level video, textual, and audio tracks resting on a lower-level substrate of bits and bytes. If by happenstance a future viewer does look at them they would, in her mind, transform into a flow of higher-level images and feelings, conveyed along a lower-level substrate of neural firings. And so it makes sense to say that they would undergo a real chrysalis: that they would morph, that they would spring to life when they make the move from the digital bank to the mind of the viewer. Meaning that—like a book on the shelf—if no one ever does view them, then my digitized memories, on into the future, will remain as dead as I am. And if that’s what lies in store, then Bell’s attempt to give our memories immortal life stands to be defeated.
“Misty Pastel-Colored Memories”
But what if that’s not what lies in store? Let’s be optimistic. Let’s assume that you can download everything that’s downloadable about your memories, and that it’s guaranteed that from time to time someone in the future will look in on them. Let’s assume that they will live on after you. Even so, there might be a problem. It’s not that other minds won’t view your digital record. It’s that your digital record won’t reflect your own mind.
While I can digitize any memory that consists of words, sounds, and images, some memories—in fact, my most important memories—cannot be fully or even fractionally captured in text, audio, or video. They consist of indescribable feelings, untransmittable sensations, incommunicable meanings: the kind of memory about which Wittgenstein said: “Nobody but I can see it, feel it, hear it; nobody except myself knows what it is like. Nobody except I can get at it.”20
These kinds of intimate and inimitable glimmerings lie beyond expression through text or evocation by video. The novelist W. G. Sebald shows this better than anyone. His pages are filled with groping words and gauzy images that scarcely manage to imply otherwise unutterable remembrances. Sebald’s character Jacques Austerlitz harbors the following elusive, barely articulable but (to him) deeply meaningful recollection of a moment from his youth on Barmouth Bay, Wales:
all forms and colors were dissolved in a pearl-gray haze; there were no contrasts, no shading anymore, only flowing transitions with the light throbbing through them, a single blur from which only the most fleeting of visions emerged, and strangely—I remember this well—it was the very evanescence of those visions that gave me, at the time, something like a sense of eternity.21
Okay. Digitize that.
Still, who can say? We might one day gain the capacity to digitally conserve for all time, and hence come to know, even those contents of each other’s memories that cannot be conveyed in words and images. Suppose that we cracked that nut. Suppose that others on into the future, viewing your digital record, would feel, sense, and grasp the utter totality of what you felt, sensed, and grasped during your lifetime, even to the last ineffable nuance. Your memories would be fully immortalized, living on forever. Is this what you would want?
Think again of the ritual of jersey retiring. We proclaim, as a “memorial” to a great athlete, that the number that once attached to him will never again be sported by anyone else on his team—perhaps in the entire league. We erase it from public view. But as I’ve suggested it’s an odd kind of memorial. It differs profoundly from a statue that thrusts the great one’s dynamic appearance into public sight. Or a web page that displays podcasts of his triumphant moments for all to marvel at. Or a book that explores his sensitive side for everyone to admire. Instead, something about him—number 99—is deliberately withdrawn from the gaze of the public. Something that might otherwise remind us of him, that might spark our memories of his greatness like nothing else—after all, what attaches more readily to Gretzky than number 99?—gets removed from view. What kind of memorial is that?
What’s going on here is rooted in a kind of Hippocratic oath that memorials in effect take: first of all, do no harm. A memorial to a person must respect, not stain, the memories that it recalls. As long as the memorial takes the form of a statue or a website or a book, it remains clear that no one else is presuming to claim anything even remotely proximate to (say) Gretzky’s commanding appearance, or his record-breaking accomplishments, or his life story. No one else is horning in on his memory, presuming to bask along with him in its glow. And so we are fine with it.
But when the memorial entails another person claiming—even seeming to claim—the status we accord the great one, then we balk. If Gretzky wore number 99, and Joe Blow now wears number 99, Blow doesn’t keep Gretzky’s memory alive so much as he tarnishes it. In memorializing Gretzky this way, Blow is suggesting that he somehow feels capable of filling Gretzky’s shoes—or shirt; that he somehow shares the same status. When NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman “retired number 99 league-wide,” the International Ice Hockey Federation’s website observed, “he was only doing what every player to follow would have done anyway . . . the first person who even tried to wear the number would have been ridiculed for trying to follow in the Great One’s footsteps.”22 He would have been scorned for sullying the memory of number 99 by presuming to share in it, not praised for trying to honor Gretzky by memorializing him, for calling him to mind.
Something similar may be true if I seek to digitally bank my most cherished or intimate memories, such that others can share in them: view them, understand them, grasp them in the same full-blossomed, full-bodied way I did. True, if no others ever do, then those memories will die with me. But what kind of memorial tribute can it be if, in the process of keeping a memory of mine alive, others necessarily sully it by sharing it?
One of the great comic scenes in John Updike’s “Rabbit” series occurs in the latter part of the final book, Rabbit at Rest. Rabbit, aka Harry Angstrom, is attending the funeral of Thelma Harrison, with whom he had been conducting a long affair. Her widower Ronnie, having just heard Thelma’s deathbed confession of her unfaithfulness, confronts Rabbit. Taken by surprise, and grasping for words to console Ronnie about the quality of woman Ronnie had spent his life with, Rabbit whispers a few syllables of succor. Not “She was a great mother.” Not “She was a lovely person.” Rabbit comforts Ronnie with what he knows: “She was a fantastic lay.”23
Maybe Ronnie would indeed have wanted others to know what a fantastic lover his wife was. Maybe Ronnie would have wanted others to know that, among his memories, there were many enviable recollections of extraordinarily blissful intimacy. Presumably this is what the dim-witted King Ahasuerus in the Book of Esther was up to when he called for his queen, Vashti, to appear before the assembled court wearing (nothing but) the crown royal. But though Ronnie, like Ahasuerus, might have wanted others to know that he was blessed with a trove of euphoric erotic memories, he would not have wanted others to know those memories themselves. He would have preferred that they die with him, rather than live on in the memory of others, such as Rabbit, to share: to understand, grasp, and know as fully as he, Ronnie, did.
True, Rabbit shares Ronnie’s memories of Thelma only indirectly, and that is because he shared Thelma directly. Suppose instead that Ronnie had digitized his memories of Thelma in all their emotional and sensual glory, preserving them as part of an online archive so that they wouldn’t die with him. Then in viewing them Rabbit—or any future Rabbit—would instead have shared those particular memories directly, and Thelma only indirectly. Possibly Ronnie would have been less jealous, perhaps even in some weird way more fulfilled, with the direct sharing of his memories than with the direct sharing of Thelma. Yes, digitizing them would keep those memories alive in the minds of others. They would do so, however, only at the cost of indelibly tainting their intimacy, of erodin
g the privilege Ronnie had of being the only one to know them. “’Twere profanation of our joys/To tell the laity our love.”
Better to allow such memories to die with us. Better that they remain as mortal as we are. Faux immortality, via the digitized immortality of our memory banks, remains in the most crucial way not an option—certainly not when it comes to the memories that matter most. And I’m not talking just about erotic or romantic memories. I doubt whether E. M. Forster would have wanted anyone else to intrude upon, listen in on, or lay claim to the tender moments he shared with his mother. They belonged only to him, or to her, but certainly to no one else. If such memories were to live on once she’d gone, as indeed Forster hoped they would, then they could so do only in his own mind, the mind of the other subject who experienced them. But live on as “objective data” for other minds to view?24 No. Even though they numbered among his most important, most identity-conferring memories—the kind of memories most capable of making the person whom Forster really was live on—it was better that they died with him.
And yet one final question remains.
Look again at jersey retiring. You know what number 99 did. He was the most sublime hockey player of all time. And the reason you can never wear his number, if you play for the NHL, is that although you can—indeed you should—know what he did, you could never do what he did. And so to properly memorialize Gretzky, his fans make sure that the world knows what he did by recording the memory of his accomplishments in scores of statues and books and websites. Meanwhile they make sure that no one even symbolically claims to do what he did, to usurp or tarnish that memory, by insisting that no future NHL player wear his number.
But we can’t both know and not know what someone else knew. No one in the future will be in a position both to know your digitized memories, thus keeping them alive, and to not know them, thus paying tribute—in cases where they are most intimate—to their unique association with you alone. Whenever Nabokov took a deeply personal memory and attributed it to a character in one of his novels—thereby giving it a kind of immortality in the minds of readers on into the future—it lost its intimate warmth for him.25
That is why we have adopted a particular kind of “negative” memorial for certain intimate, unshareable remembrances. It’s silence itself. It’s silence as memorial. We document, as we should always continue to do, the horrors of the Holocaust: what the Nazis did. But when it comes to memorializing what the victims themselves underwent, we don’t pretend that we could ever know or share or understand for ourselves the memories that afflict them. To presume that we could would be unseemly. And so, for many survivors, silence suggests itself as the only way of memorializing their experiences, even at the cost of allowing those memories to die with them. That is why oral-history collections in which Holocaust survivors do try to speak about their memories—themselves still a far cry from the direct memory archives Gordon Bell recommends—are controversial. They place a survivor in the position of trying to keep her memories alive in the minds of future generations, but at the cost of putting in question their unshareable singularity. Trying to keep such memories alive flouts the conviction that in the final analysis they can—and should—belong only to those who actually experienced them.26
We can keep certain kinds of memories alive only at the risk of degrading them. But the first rule of memorials requires that, above all, a memorial should do no harm. And so for some memories—memories that would be desecrated or debased were they shared—the most fitting memorial possible necessitates wrapping them in conspicuous silence and letting them die. This rule applies equally to the life-log project, which purports to keep our memories alive by enabling others to share them till the end of time. It won’t work, at least when it comes to many of the memories that matter most. They must die with us.
At the moment, we live in a world in which the vast bulk of our memories remain private, known only to ourselves. Memorials, mean while, are mostly public things like plaques and statues.
But suppose that one day all of our memories could become public. Suppose that they could all be made available online. Would a true memorial, something that above all avoids tainting whatever cherished thing it memorializes, not then require keeping it private, known only by ourselves? In a world where everybody can know your memories, why not a memorial you alone can know? Like the memorial of deliberate silence, of intentionally not sharing that memory? A memorial that, of course, could be known only to you.
Or put it another way. Currently, we live in a world where a memorial is an object bounded in space that commemorates moments that happened once upon a time. Gordon Bell, by contrast, promises a world in which the moments of our lives can, themselves, live on as objects in space: bits and bytes in the “spatial dimension” of digitized storage. Fittingly, then, won’t the most important kind of memorial—the type that does true justice to the most precious moments being memorialized—simply be to make those moments bounded in time? To allow them to die with us?
The most precious moments of our lives cannot persist over time in the form of spatial objects like bits and bytes. Our memories of those moments are too intimate and ineffable to do anything other than begin flowing back in time, out of the reach and realm of others, as soon as we have died. Gordon Bell tries to deny this. He insists that we mortals can forever preserve our personal knowledge of the past in a way that replicates what immortality would allow. But this consolation for our mortality cannot work. Not really. Not for what matters most.
six
REGRETS? HOW MUCH TIME DO YOU HAVE?
Driving through the provincial countryside one summer’s day in the 1970s, the premier of Manitoba, Ed Schreyer, and his wife, Lily, stopped for gas. Imagine their surprise when the man who came round to fill their tank was none other than Mrs. Schreyer’s high-school boyfriend. “Where would you be if you had married him instead of me?” Mr. Schreyer needled as they pulled out of the station. “I’d be the wife,” Mrs. Schreyer retorted, “of the premier of Manitoba.”
Suppose that Mrs. Schreyer had taken that same attitude not just toward her marriage but toward all of her life’s major endeavors. Then she would have abided in a rare mental sweet spot—one from which all serious regret had been banished. After all, whatever path she chose when confronted with life’s major decisions, it would have ultimately led back to the same broad highway. Whomever she married, she would have made that man into the premier of the province. By the same logic, whatever early career opportunities she might have chosen, thanks to her creative impulse she still would have developed into the visual artist she in fact became. Whatever hobbies or outside interests she pursued, she ultimately would have found her way to fulfillment in helping a disadvantaged group in society, as she did for people with physical disabilities. How can you regret your life choices if, whatever you’d decided upon, you’d have ended up at the same place?
“Regrets,” says Martin Chuzzlewit, “are the natural property of grey hairs.” Even more so as the aging turn into the dying. According to a 2006 British report, a person’s last cogent thought is likely to be a regret of some sort: not having married her high-school crush (or having married her high-school crush), not having spent enough time with her children, not having continued her education, not having chosen the right career, not having seen enough of the world, not having been true to herself.1
Looming mortality tends to magnify such thoughts. After all, if there were no time limits on our life, we would eventually (or so we think) be able to banish our regrets. We could seek out our high-school sweetheart—now beyond-tired of her current spouse—and take as much time as necessary to woo her. We could return to graduate school and get that doctorate in Sanskrit, the true passion we abandoned for a career in accountancy, or spend thirty years writing the ten-volume history of the Marshall Islands we never got around to producing. Whether we are fifty or five hundred or five thousand years old—as long as our life is active and ongoing with the usual quantum
of failures and false starts—death will invariably catch us with regrets. It seems as if we could always use more time to correct the past. At whatever point it arrives, death cuts off our capacity to do so.2
But maybe there are ways in which, even within a mortal life, we can banish regret: write our own corrections into the proof of our life and then seal them on the record. Maybe we don’t need to live on indefinitely to permanently eliminate all our serious misgivings, to put our own stamp of satisfaction on the past. Lily Schreyer seems to have done it. Why not the rest of us?
Harvard Men
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, 268 Harvard undergraduates—all men, as Harvard was not coed at the time—were recruited for a long-term psychological study. Interviewing them regularly over the coming decades, scientists aimed to pinpoint those youthful personal attributes that most reliably predict a successful middle and old age. The “Harvard Grant Study,” as it came to be called, developed into one of the few surveys ever conducted that tracks individual lives over nearly their entire duration.
But as time went on, the study’s focus underwent a subtle shift. Instead of trying to predict the men’s futures, attention turned to how well they were coming to terms with their lengthening pasts. When the surviving men were around ninety, the study’s final interviews were conducted. And what they disclose is an array of strategies for making permanent peace with life’s missed opportunities: for finally banishing life’s regrets before you die.
Let’s take just one recurring theme, romantic regret, as an illustration. As we age, how should we think about the one—or ones—who got away when we were younger? The one with whom we went, say, for a moonlit walk when we were eighteen but whom, when the moment was right, we didn’t have the nerve to kiss? Who knows what would have happened if we had?
Here’s one way that emerges for interpreting such events from the lives of the Harvard men—and I will assume we are talking about a heterosexual man, as most of the study’s participants seem to have been. Because a girl liked him enough to join him on a moonlit walk years ago, a romance with her was once a live possibility. And so he can feel cheered in knowing that there was a time when he attracted her. But because it remained just that—a possibility that never materialized—he can feel relieved in knowing that he never had the chance to let her down by botching the kiss or, if they actually had had an affair, becoming tedious to her. Neither a delusional fantasy nor a sordid reality, the romantic road not taken can become a kind of sunlit later-life reverie: something more worth savoring than regretting. “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.”3