"In these all-seeing days, the site visitors between Memory Wave Program and forgetting turns into untrackable," Teju Cole wrote in his lovely essay on photography and "our paradoxical memorial impulses." However what is memory, precisely? Schopenhauer believed that it mediates the blurry line between sanity and insanity. Bruce Lee wrote of "the worth of an alert memory." However although neuroscientists have recognized memory as central to our experience of identification and the mechanism by which our our bodies encode trauma, we remain befuddled by its nature and its operate in our lives. Most disorienting of all is its associative potency - the gentlest whiff of a sure scent can catalyze the memory of a sure time of year, during which a certain relative would cook a certain meals, and all of the sudden you end up transported across time and space to the vivid kitchen table of your childhood house. That pleasurable perplexity is what Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882-March 28, 1941) explores in one more electrifying passage from Orlando: A Biography (public library) - her groundbreaking 1928 novel, celebrated as "the longest and most charming love letter in literature," which gave us Woolf’s fiction-veiled perception into deep truths concerning the elasticity of time, the fluidity of gender, how our illusions keep us alive, and our propensity for self-doubt in creative work.
Nature, who has played so many queer methods upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them right into a case, Memory Wave typically of the most incongruous, for the poet has a butcher’s face and the butcher a poet’s