Remembering is a labor, not a luxury.
The snowball effect. The avalanche slides toward the valley, gaining speed as it goes, because little by little it gets larger, carrying with it the weight of all it has been before.
Paola observed that when I try to speak English, I mak mistakes, but I do not when I speak German or French. "That doesn't surprise me," she said. "You must have absorbed French as a child, and it's still in your tongue the way bicycles are still in your legs. You learned German from textbooks in college, and you remember everything from books. But English, on the other hand, you learned during your travels, later. It belongs to your personal experiences of the past thirty years, and only bits of it have stuck to your tongue."
Do you know, you're the only man in the world, the only man on the face of the Earth from Adam up to now, who when his wife sends him out to buy roses comes home with a pair of dog balls?
My memory is made of paper.
I was seeing my own shit for the first time (in the city you sit on the bowl, then flush the toilet right away, without looking) I was now calling it shit, which I think is what people call it. Shit is the most personal and private thing we have. Anyone can get to know the rest - your facial expression, your gaze, your gestures. Even your naked body: at the beach, at the doctor's, making love. Even your thoughts, since you usually express them, or else others guess them from the way you look at them or appear embarrassed. Of course, there are such things as secret thoughts, but in general, thoughts too are revealed. Shit, however, is not. Except for an extremely brief period of your life, when your mother is still changing your diapers, it is all yours. And since my shit at that moment must not have been all that different from what I had produced ever the course of my past life, I was in that Instant reuniting with my old, forgotten self, undergoing the first experience capable of merging with countless previous experiences even those from when I did my business in the vineyards as a boy.
I said to myself: Yambo, your memory is made of paper. Not of neurons, but of pages. Maybe someday someone will invent an electronic contraption allowing people to travel by computer among all the pages ever written, from the beginning of the world till today, and to pass from one to another with the touch of a finger without knowing any longer where or who they are, and the everyone will be like you.
Is it worth to be born if you cannot remember it later?
To die is to remove oneself from the beating of one's heart.
I can't bring myself to believe that all these things we see around us - the way trees and fruits grow, and the solar system, and our brains - came about by chance. They're too well made. And therefore there must have been a creating mind. God.
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