Editing history

I seem to have become the repository for the documents of our family history. I don't actually know how that happened. I've been sorting through, sorting out and finally throwing out. The exact parallel is clearing a person's house after their death.

These are a stack of photographs that I have deemed redundant, the albums behind containing those I deem to be of some significance. History edited once by a sort of happenstance, and again now by me, by some unarticulated criteria. It's not so much the victors as the survivors who select which version of history remains.

I once had a friend who would ruthlessly go through the prints destroying anything that was less than flattering to her. By some quirk of fate I have not a single shot of her. But she has been much in my mind today. In the days of film I inherited the habit of keeping everything, warts and all. This all changed with digital of course but it still begs the question we blippers negotiate every day - what is worth keeping, sharing?

Oliver Sacks on Memory
There is, it seems, no mechanism in the mind or the brain for ensuring the truth, or at least the veridical character, of our recollections. We have no direct access to historical truth, and what we feel or assert to be true [...] depends as much on our imagination as our senses.

There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way, which is different in every individual to begin with, and differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever they are recollected.

[...]

Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other, and ourselves-the stories we continually recategorize and refine. Such subjectivity is built into the very nature of memory, and follows from its basis and mechanisms in the human brain.

Full article here.