In Yasunari Kawabata's unsettling short story, Yumiura, a novelist
receives an unexpected visit from a woman who says she knew him 30 years
earlier. They met when he visited the town of Yumiura during a harbor
festival, the woman explains. But the novelist cannot remember her.
Plagued recently by other troublesome memory lapses, he sees this latest
incident as a further sign of mental decline. His discomfort turns to
alarm when the woman offers more revelations about what happened on a day
when he visited her room. "You asked me to marry you," she recalls
wistfully. The novelist reels while contemplating the magnitude of what
he had forgotten. The woman explains that she had never forgotten their
time together and felt continually burdened by her memories of
him.
After she finally leaves, the shaken novelist searches maps for the
town of Yumiura with the hope of triggering recall of the place and the
reasons why he had gone there. But no maps or books list a town called
Yumiura. The novelist then realizes that he could not have been in the
part of the country the woman described at the time she remembered. Her
detailed, heartfelt and convincing memories were entirely false.
Kawabata's story dramatically illustrates different ways in which
memory can get us into trouble. Sometimes we forget the past and at other
times we distort it; some disturbing memories haunt us for years. Yet we
also rely on memory to perform an astonishing variety of tasks in our
everyday lives. Recalling conversations with friends or recollecting
family vacations; remembering appointments and errands we need to run;
calling up words that allow us to speak and under stand others;
remembering foods we like and dislike; acquiring the knowledge needed for
a new job -- all depend, in one way or another, on memory. Memory plays
such a pervasive role in our daily lives that we often take it for
granted until an incident of forgetting or distortion demands our
attention.
Memory's errors have long fascinated scientists, and during the
past decade they have come to occupy a prominent place in our society.
Forgotten encounters, misplaced eyeglasses and failures to recall the
names of familiar faces are becoming common occurrences for many adults
who are busily trying to juggle the demands of work and family, and cope
with the bewildering array of new communications technologies. How many
passwords and "PINs" do you have to remember just to manage your affairs
on the Internet, not to mention your voice mail at the office or on your
cell phone?
In addition to dealing with the frustrations of memory failures in
daily life, the awful specter of Alzheimer's disease looms large on the
horizon. As the general public becomes ever more aware of its horrors, the prospects of a life dominated by catastrophic forgetting
further increase our preoccupations with memory.
Although the magnitude of the woman's memory distortion in Yumiura
seems to stretch the bounds of credulity, it has been equaled and even
exceeded in everyday life. Consider the story of Binjimin Wilkomirski,
whose Holocaust memoir, Fragments, won worldwide acclaim for
portraying life in a concentration camp from the perspective of a child.
Wilkomirski presented readers with raw, vivid recollections of the
unspeakable terrors he witnessed as a young boy. Even more remarkable,
Wilkomirski had spent much of his adult life unaware of these traumatic
childhood memories, only becoming aware of them in therapy. Because his
story and memories inspired countless others, Wilkomirski became a
sought-after international figure and a hero to Holocaust
survivors.
The story began to unravel, however, when
Daniel Ganzfried, a Swiss journalist and himself the son of a Holocaust
survivor, published a stunning article in a Zurich newspaper. Ganzfried
revealed that Wilkomirski is actually Bruno Dossekker, a Swiss native
born in 1941 to a young woman named Yvone Berthe Grosjean, who later gave
him up for adoption to an orphanage. His foster parents, the Dossekkers,
found him there. Young Bruno spent all of the war years in the safe
confines of his native Switzerland. Whatever the basis for his traumatic
"memories" of Nazi horrors, they did not come from childhood experiences
in a concentration camp. Is Dossekker/Wilkomirski simply a liar? Probably
not: he still strongly believes his recollections are real.
Memory's errors are as fascinating as they are important. They can
be divided into seven fundamental transgressions or "sins," which I call
transience, absentmindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility,
bias and persistence. Just like the ancient seven deadly sins -- pride,
anger, envy, greed, gluttony, lust and sloth -- the memory sins occur
frequently in everyday life and can have serious consequences for all of
us.
Transience, absentmindedness and blocking are sins of omission: we
fail to bring to mind a desired fact, event or idea. Transience refers to
a weakening or loss of memory over time. It is a basic feature of memory,
and the culprit in many memory problems. Absentmindedness involves a
breakdown at the interface between attention and memory. Absentminded
memory errors -- misplacing your keys or eyeglasses, or forgetting a lunch
appointment -- typically occur because we are preoccupied with distracting
issues or concerns, and don't focus attention on what we need to
remember.
Tags:
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conversations,
different ways,
everyday lives,
family vacations,
magnitude,
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Memory,
memory memory,
mental decline,
new job,
pervasive role,
revelations,
short story,
unexpected visit,
yasunari kawabata
