'Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away'

28 January 2000 | Reflections

Some Philosophy! Some Coffee!  ☕

Memories from diaries! 😍

While going through my past [and personal] diary jottings of almost around two decades ago, down the lovely little lane of nostalgia, I couldn’t help connecting my recollections with Astrid Erll’s famous take on ‘Memories’ - which goes thus - 

… memories are small islands in a sea of forgetting.

From my personal diary jottings, 28 January 2000

A bevy of lovely friends, classmates, batchmates, teachers – they all find mention in this particular day’s jottings – along with a host of events / incidents that made this day memorable for me and we!

Both individually and collectively!

Well, now, take a moment to just imagine catching up with your school friends or college mates one fine day, over a cup of coffee!

Or again,

Just imagine getting back for a grand alumni get-together, after say, 25 years or 30 years, where you gather together in the same school premises where you had studied!

What would you do?

I guess, you won’t be that interested in discussing a Donald Trump or a Bill Gates with your lovely friends of the good ol’ days, as much as you’d be interested in recollecting those snatches from memory that ‘take your breath away’, ain’t you?

The cute bunkings you did, when you wanted to play cricket or football with your classmates in the playground, or the evening tea time with pals that were filled with myriad delightful, ‘sweet-nothings’ of a conversation, that went on and on and on...

or 😊

during exam time, when you all came together, (like those cricketers in international cricket, making a circle before starting on a game, just to boost the confidence levels of their team mates, or to discuss on ‘specific strategies’ for the game) in one great grand circle, and indulged yourself in the sensational phenomenon called, ‘combined studies’, where even the most playfullest of the lot would sit, as good as could be, not batting an eyelid, in utmost concentration, dedication and devotion to the subject being discussed – a concentration that escaped a hundred lectures given by those towering scholarly professors! 🥰

Well, as Sartre rightly points out,

One does not possess one’s past as one possesses a thing!

However, you can bring it back from memory, through recollections of specific memorable events!

That’s because there’s a magic in recollection!

A charm in recollection!

An inexpressible, indescribable delight in recollection!

As Maya Angelou says,

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

Yes! Those charming moments that ‘took our breath away’ in days past!

That’s hence, to Erll, Astrid Erll,

… memories are small islands in a sea of forgetting.

How beautiful, ain’t it?

And Astrid Erll, adds up to say,

Since forgetting is the rule and remembering the exception,

memory studies seeks to ‘reconstruct’ the ‘intellectual history of forgetting’, and emphasize the social, historical, and ethical significance of forgetting and related aspects, such as amnesia, oblivion, silence, and forgiving.

Now comes the most important part to Erll, that connects with my diary jottings -

Well, moving on to Cultural Memory, she quotes Halbwachs when she says -

Individual memory has to go hand in hand with cultural memory!

Quite fascinating an insight, ain’t it?

When for the first time Halbwachs came up with this hypothesis, his contemporaries and critics alike, were not favourably disposed to accept these validations from their friend!

Interestingly, it was Halbwachs and Warburg who were the first to give the phenomenon of cultural memory a name (‘collective’ and ‘social’ memory, respectively).

A student of Henri Bergson and Emile Durkheim, Halbwachs wrote three texts in which he developed his concept of mémoire collective and which today occupy a central place in the study of cultural memory.

Halbwachs’s theory, which sees even the most personal memory as a - mémoire collective - a collective phenomenon,

provoked significant protest, not least from his colleagues at the University of Strasbourg, Charles Blondel and Marc Bloch.

The latter accused Halbwachs, and the Durkheim School in general, of an unacceptable collectivization of individual psychological phenomena.

Stirred by this criticism, Halbwachs began elaborating his concept of collective memory in a second book.

For more than 15 years he worked on the text The Collective Memory, where again he emphasises on the importance of individual memory to Cultural Memory, because, of the default dependence of individual memory on the range of social structures to which he/she belongs!

So individual memory has to go hand in hand with cultural memory, says Halbwachs.

That means, there are collective elements in individual memory that makes it collective memory or shared memory or cultural memory!

It could be a cup of coffee at your favourite bistro, with your friends, it could be a delightful book that you bought at your favourite book shop with your friends, it could be those delightful long trips that you made with your bevy of friends – be it on train journeys, local autos or even by the grand bicycle on ‘double pedal’ modes!

Coming back, hence,

Much more fundamental for Halbwachs, however, is the fact that it is through interaction and communication with our fellow humans that we acquire knowledge about dates and facts, collective concepts of time and space, and ways of thinking and experiencing.

Because we participate in a collective symbolic order, we can discern, interpret and remember past events.

It is only through individual acts of memory that the collective memory can be observed, since ‘each memory is a viewpoint on the collective memory’.

Every individual belongs to several social groups: family, religious community, colleagues, and so on.

Each person thus has at his or her disposal a supply of different, group-specific experiences and thought systems.

Thus, what Halbwachs seems to suggest is that while memory is no purely individual phenomenon, but must be seen in its fundamentally collective dimension, it is the combination of various group allegiances and the resultant frameworks for remembering that are the actual individual element which distinguishes one person from another.

Repeating Erll yet again,

It is only through individual acts of memory that the collective memory can be observed, since ‘each memory is a viewpoint on the collective memory’.

How true, Halbwachs proves!