The return to school brings back a cascade of memories for us, veteran ex-students. It is enough to wander around the neighborhood schoolyard one morning at recess and hear the deafening hubbub, the murmurs and the kicking of the ball to activate the memory. Suddenly, a laughing It brings us back to the classroom, and immerses us in the atmosphere that Collodi describes when Pinocchio arrives, in the early morning, in the “land of toys”: “This country was unlike any other country in the world. The entire population was made up of children. The oldest were fourteen, the youngest barely eight.” It is remarkable how specific events related to school are remembered, and how they influence our lives. Interactions with classmates and teaching staff can have lasting consequences, not always favorable. However, was it really then as we remember it now? A reunion of former students recently confronted me with the fact that school, as we remember it, is no longer what it used to be. Episodic memory—the system that allows us to remember past experiences—is not a literal reproduction of the past. It is prone to errors, illusions and distortions, it is delicate. A memorable phrase by the anthropologist Marc Augé captures it: “Memories are created by forgetting as the contours of the coast are created by the sea.”
In a conversation with American psychologist Daniel Schacter, former head of the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, a leading researcher of human memory and author of The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (Ariel) explains to me: “Memory is reconfigured from the present, meaning that past events and experiences are reinterpreted based on the present. This memory is in turn transformative of social reality, and promotes new alternatives for interpreting the here and now.” The direction of our memories is not from the past to the present, but, on the contrary, from the present to the past; who we are now affects how we perceive the past, how we shape it, reshape it, or even invent it. However, the past is never completely mute, and yes, it informs the present. In his lab, Schacter and his colleagues have explored the idea that memory plays a fundamental role not only in allowing us to access our past, but also in imagining or simulating events that could occur in our future, and proposes that “the role of memory in simulating future events is essential to understanding the constructive nature of memory.”
That weekend some of us traveled to meet up with our classmates and embark on a mental journey through time. At each previous meeting the gathering had taken a different tone, this time there was something more poignant and somber; we reflected on who came and who didn’t, we took roll call. It became clear how difficult it is to go back and face the kind of memories that were animated by the presence of the group. Context undoes the decades that have passed—there is something about being with all of them that evokes the memory of who we were, each one of us. By exchanging stories we try to build a bridge, some kind of meaning between these unrepeatable teenagers, and what has become of us in each of our subsequent iterations. There may be a competitive undertone to all this, as if we were comparing notes, but above all it is a desire to connect—the contest ended years ago. Why do some of us want to go back and others can’t stand it? Reunions of this kind arouse ambivalence; On the one hand, the idea can generate excitement, euphoria (from the Greek euphoria: “strength to endure”), but on the other hand, it is likely to represent a sudden threat to one’s identity. In the space of a brief meeting, we are called upon to reconcile past expectations with our present reality among people who shared that past. We might say that we attend these meetings to prove that we are still alive and moving forward, that we continue to march toward some kind of inexorable goal.
Few personal memories are exclusively individual, most refer to shared situations. In 1925, the French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs published The social frameworks of memorya book that advances the notion of a “collective memory.” Although memory, or better yet, the act of remembering, is essentially an individual process, Halbwachs emphasized that it depends on our social structures. We participate in a collective symbolic order that provides us with cognitive schemata, concepts of time and space, and patterns of thought with which we remember and interpret past events. Thus, social frameworks constitute the multidimensional horizon within which the act of remembering takes place. Most of what you “remember” from school has been reconfigured: were you the brain, the athlete, the lost cause, or the princess? The reunion of alumni is a time to reconnect and share vulnerabilities, to rethink and update our past, and in a way, to enliven the future as well. Although the journey can be dizzying.
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