The Buried Giant, By Kazou Ishiguro

Memories are important, they are a personal record of our past experiences, and could be called the history book for our life. In the poem "The Heroes You Had as a Girl", author Bronwen Wallace tells the story of a woman who meets her high school hero later in her life, reflects on her memories of him, and ultimately decides not to talk to him. The effect that this topic has on everyone is the knowledge that we can be captivated and let our memories control us, and by knowing that our memories hold that much power, it may make it more mentally efficient to make accurate, and personal decisions in a fraction of the time. The topic and overall meaning that this idea holds convey a message that resonates with the idea that memories are in fact the central hub of our decision making. People remembering memories can affect their perspective on their lives to such an extent, that they prefer to immerse their mind in their past memories rather than the current reality.

Memory is essential to society because memory gives society hope for the future. According to Elie Wiesel in his speech titled Hope, Despair, and Memory, he states, “Without memory,our existence would be barren and opaque, like a prison cell into which no light penetrates;like a tomb rejects the living.” Wiesel, in other words says that without memory,

Forgetfulness can be seen in many different lights; it can be seen a bad thing, or a good thing. In the poem “Forgetfulness” by Hart Crane, the speaker utilizes similes and metaphors to convey ideas about forgetfulness in order to develop the theme; in the poem by Billy Collins with the same name, the speaker utilizes personification and irony to convey ideas about forgetfulness to develop the theme.

Le uses descriptive imagery of objects in order to show the internal nature of the characters. The narrator holds a butterfly paperweight next to her ear and “[hears] a soft rustling, like wings brushing against a windowpane. The rustling was a whispered song. It was the butterfly’s way of speaking, and [she] thought [she] understood it” (Le 25) Le captures the narrator’s young, wild imagination by showing an impossible interaction between the narrator and the butterfly paperweight. She evokes an image of wings brushing against a windowpane to prompt readers to imagine the butterfly’s swift fluttering in the paperweight. She compares the paperweight to her “Ba’s heavy head pressed down on the pillow at night, full of thoughts that dragged him into nightmares when all he wanted was a dream as sweet

“Memories I sometimes wish I could wash away, even though I am aware that they are an important part of what my life is; whom I am now” (Beah 19). Remembering things reminds him of who he is.

Memories are not tangible objects you can buy, but intangibles souvenirs one can only keep by constantly remembering them. The largest tragedies of life are forgetting memories. Jane Eyre 50 Quotation Dialectal 7. “I can so clearly distinguish between the criminal and his crime; I can so sincerely forgive the first while I abhor the last.”(ch. 6, pg.

Every act of remembering is also, intrinsically, an act of forgetting. Giving preference to particular details of an event lessens the immediacy of others. Thus, memory is its own, unique narrative culled from an almost endless sea of details present, and sometimes not present, in the original event. Memory is the past, reformulated and interpreted through the lens of the present (Huyssen 1995). When an event is commemorated through a physical act of memory, the narrowing of possible details becomes even more finely tuned, limited by the physical scope of possibilities for bodies in a three-dimensional space.

Memory provides a sense of personal identity. Memories that were made from the past create the person that they have become today. It helps to ground judgments and with reasoning. As an illustration, one day a young girl was shopping at the mall with a group of friends and they deiced to steal a cute

F. Scott Fitzgerald understands that memory is a double-edged sword, and he illustrates this thought in two of his short stories, Babylon Revisited and Winter Dreams. In his story Babylon Revisited, the protagonist, Charles Wales, is tormented by memories of his past. His wife is dead, and his old friends won’t stop interfering in his life. His sister-in-law is basing her current ideas of him on the fact that he was an irresponsible person in the past, and it hurts his life greatly. Winter Dreams takes a slightly different approach. In this tale, the memories of the protagonist, Dexter Green, start off as pleasant but are later warped by new information. With these two works, Fitzgerald describes the problems that memories can cause in

Primo Levi explores memory in a much deeper fashion than society. The fact that Levi devoted his time to a subject society does not care to pay much attention to, is attractive to me. It is interesting the way Levi presents and supports his theories. For example, Levi argues that memory is selective. Levi then uses the example:

The value of memory is an important aspect in a person’s life because most of the time our brains will go back into our memory and recall past events weather them being good or bad. Memory plays a part in every human being’s life, whether it may be about a great loss of someone you loved dearly or it be a great gift like having a child or a miracle happen like getting a perfect score on your SATs. Memory will always be an aspect in everyone’s life. In the passage, “Hope, Despair, and Memory” by Elie Wiesel, and in the excerpt from The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger the value of memory are treated in both worthy and harmful ways using diction, repetition, and theme.

“Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory,” Dr. Seuss. Thought and emotions are items that will always last forever inside of humans through thick and thin. Not all the tangible objects given to people will forever withstand their life but the thoughts will always be there for eternity. Many people believe that they would be able to remember anything from an event and the different features of the situation but, people don’t realize the fact that the more they think about a situation the more the memory will change. The excerpt from The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger and the excerpt, “Hope, Despair and Memory,” from Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Prize lecture both portray the value of memory through the contradictory

Memory is needed in order to form a sense of individuality. Without memory, civilizations would not be able to progress and expand. In the novel, Obasan, we get to see that based on memory, there's a spectrum that is formed. On one side, we have Uncle and Obasan who believe that the past remains there. On the other end is aunt Emily, she believes that only by discussing and expressing past events we can ensure that they never happen again and that these events mark a place in history.

Memory is one of our greatest assets. “It is how we know who we are. Memory gives us a sense of history, our origin, roots, and identity. By it we relive special events, birthdays, anniversaries and days of national significance. The Lord’s Supper is a call to remember Christ and the cross.” The relationships we have in our lives often become stronger as we take time to reflect on what that person has done for us in the past and continues to do for us. As adults we are able to look back and see the sacrifices our parents made for us and we realize just how much they

Memory – what it is, how it works, and how it might be manipulated – has long been a subject of curious fascination. Remembering, the mind-boggling ability in which the human brain can conjure up very specific, very lucid, long-gone episodes from any given point on the timeline of our lives, is an astounding feat. Yet, along with our brain’s ability of remembrance comes also the concept of forgetting: interruptions of memory or “an inability of consciousness to make present to itself what it wants” (Honold, 1994, p. 2). There is a very close relationship between remembering and forgetting; in fact, the two come hand-in-hand. A close reading of Joshua Foer’s essay, “The End of Remembering”, and Susan Griffin’s piece, “Our Secret”, directs us