The greater part of my leisure is spent watching movies, and the diverse array on offer are a testament to the creativity of the most fertile hearts and minds. Of late there is one particular line that caught my attention, and I couldn't help thinking over it again and again.
In the movie Chunking Express, by the acclaimed Chinese director Wong Kar Wai, the protagonist He Qiwu (aka cop 223) breaks up with his girlfriend May on 1st April and decides to wait for a month with the anticipation of mending their relationship. So everyday he goes to the store and buys a tin of pineapple with May 1 as the expiry date, which is his birthday. He believes that by the end of that period he will either be successful in getting back together with his girlfriend or the relationship would expire forever. It is at this moment that he poses this profound question"If memories could be canned, would they also have expiry dates?"
and comes up with an equally optimistic answer.
"If so, I hope they last for centuries."
Although the thought lies on the boundary of absurdity, yet the idea of having our memories canned with a certain expiration date is moving and worth pondering over. The broader question can therefore be deconstructed as - do memories have a finite life-span? If so, do they just die out, fade or burn away; and if not, are they stacked up in a far corner of our mind and never reused (like an ancient book gathering dust in a library), or do they lie dormant only to spring back into life providing an equal measure of pain or pleasure as that of the event stored?
Presumably we have an internal method of selection and then an equally complex system of hierarchical ordering of memories (akin to putting up an expiry date which is further in the future rather than in the proximate and then its sequencing). So in a sense, the ability to recollect past memories might lie at the core of character formation. As is observed in real life, a person with a positive attitude is more likely to recollect an intensely fond memory than a pessimist. It is also true that what we are at present is a result of the cumulative building up of layers of memories - some loathsome and hideous, others cheerful and amusing.
Or is it that the causality runs both ways?
- character leads to selective retention of memories, or/and
- memories retained lead to character building.
