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Be warned : I have not proofread this essay yet.
Anyway here it is.
What we remember shapes how we see ourselves and the world we live in. What we remember goes into our brain and becomes our memory of the past. If a person does not have any memory they will be like empty vessels. Memory is essential to our daily lives and the deeper understanding of our world. However, memory is not constant. It is affected by age, emotions and stress. It is also affected the significance of events that has happened and our own mental capacity. Despite the variation, memory is still important as it shapes how we makes sense of who we are and what we have done.
We tend to remember events that are significant to us. We don't remember minor events such as what we ate last week. We usually remember significant events such as the death of a close friend, our birthday, where did we go to school. Such significant events exert far more influence on our life.
One good example is illustrated in Tennessee Williams' play “A Streetcar Named Desire”. Blanche Dubois, a fading Southern Belle suffers a series of tragedies during her youth. First, she finds that her husband Allan Grey is actually a homosexual. She could not bear the reality that he is gay. Later in a dance party she tells Allan that “You disgust me.” That prompts him to put the gun into his mouth and pulls the trigger. The death of Allan unravels Blanche's youth and pushes her life spiralling down as she carries the memory of his death for the rest of her life. The demise of her life is only accelerated when she loses her estate “Belle Reve”. This event is very significant because she is forced to depart from the upper-class world. She has to live a poor man's life. But she is so shaken by her past tragedies that she cannot accept her new identity and the new social order. She dresses in the old style, uses lies and illusion to let herself to believe that she is still living in her past. When she arrives at New Orleans to live at her sister's place, she asks her sister “Stella, you have a maid don't you?”. This question shows that Blanche is still living in her world of “Belle Reve” as her sister doesn't have the money to hire a maid. She is out of touch with the new order. Inside her sister's house she deliberately avoids strong light so she can hide the fact that her beauty is fading as she is getting older. She doesn't want to let people know that she is “not sixteen anymore.” Her past shapes her understanding to the point that she cannot live in the present and the future. She is totally confined to her past.
Another day which shaped the whole world was 9/11. We still remember the day where over three thousand people died after planes crashed into World Trade Centre and Pentagon . The victims came from different nations with a majority being Americans. From that day a number of Americans started to stereotype Muslim people as “terrorists”. Even today, if we see people wearing burqa on the bus a number of us will avoid sitting next to him/her. We cannot overcome our fear as we remember what happened on 9/11. This a narrow and prejudiced way of thinking. Unfortunately, that is how memory affects how we view people.
The memories of World War I had a great effect on Ernest Hemingway when he wrote the world “A Farewell to Arms”. Hemingway was an ambulance driver in Italy for Red Cross during World War I. The first day he arrived in Italy he had to carry mutilated bodies after a munitions factory exploded. That horrifying experience strongly affected his memory and shaped his opinion about war. The death and destruction was fixated in his head forever. A decade later, with World War I long gone and peace has set in, he published the novel “A Farewell to Arms” which is a anti-war novel. One of the reason he published the book that late after World War I was because the shadows of war too strong in his mind. He could not shake it off. The war's influence on Hemingway's novel is an evidence of how memory can shape our understanding of events around us.
An erroneous obituary of Alfred Nobel had much effect in shaping his legacy. He was the famous scientist who invented Dynamite which is widely used in war later as a mean of destruction and killing. Eight years before his death he read a obituary of him which said “The merchant of death is dead.” and went on to say “De. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.” Disappointed with how he will be remembered by people after his death, he set aside and a will and set up the Nobel Prizes. As a result we now remember him as a person who set up the much honoured Nobel Prizes but not “the merchant of death”. It is through remembering the criticism that he changed his view on himself and sets up the Nobel Prizes to prove that he supports the idea of peace.
Without memory we would be empty vessels. Any memory, either good or bad, is fundamental in helping to establish the idea of who we are, what we are doing. It also shape how we respond to and remember events afterwards. |
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發表於 19-10-2011 21:22:46
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