The Years Go By, and The Memories Fade, and These Are The Good New Days..

[elfs]

Roger Ebert asks, and answers, the question, "Would you want to live to be 500 years old?"

"Oh, no," he quotes an elderly woman approvingly. "That would be too long." Ebert adds:

What would I do with all the accumulating memories? How would it feel to remember my best friend of four centuries ago? If everyone could live to 500, would we grow tired of one another? How many centuries do I really want to listen to Justin Bieber? How many Presidential debates do I need?

The idea that we fill up, or run out of, ourselves is so depressing I don't know where to begin. Despite the fact that I blogged about a teenage memory recently doesn't mean that I remember every factoid from my personal history.

A striking example: I'm 45. In my 20s I sowed my wild oats and, like lots of people, ended up in bed with quite a few. Let's say somewhere between 10 and 20^[1]. Although I know that, at the time, I knew the names and email addresses of everyone I slept with, I can't recall those names or addresses now. They've faded, leaving only vague impressions of hurried scrambling for condoms in fold-away beds in darkened dens, and sneaking desperate fumblings in cars under bridges, neither one of us able to convince our roommates to give us space.

Memories fade. Even moreso, when we revisit memories, we build memories about remembering, coloring, modifying, mutating those memories into something else. In the process, my self builds a new self, daily, out of the machinery of yesterday. I hope that self is a better person, for some personal definition of "better," and if it is I can rejoice, and if it isn't, I can take notes on what I'll do tomorrow to make progress. There is no destination, only the journey.

People who treat death as the fitting end to the journey don't appreciate sightseeing enough. The future is going to be messy. Humanity is always a work in progress. I am a work in progress. But I'd like to see both.

^[1] Let me note that being bisexual didn't double my chances of getting laid, and that even though guys are supposedly easier than girls, they're not that much easier. The legendary gays who bedded a thousand men the right wing loved to trot out during the height of the AIDS crisis must have been truly heroic in their pursuit of sex.

Comments

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

I for one look forward to living forever. Or at least being a consciousness forever. At 39 I've just started learning new ways to learn things. Stuff I wasn't taught as a child and now I'm finding that I'm learning things faster than ever before in my life and grappling increasingly complex ideas in philosophy and mathematics.

I must admit though that from my point of view, there's no reason to live forever if you're just going to sit on the couch all day. My idea of living forever is to spend every day as passionately as I can. If I were to get hit by a bus tomorrow, my only regret in life would be that I got hit by a bus.

[lovingboth]

In the mid to late 80s lots of straight women would run away screaming if they thought you were bisexual. See the UK's Cosmopolitan 1988 survey where 68% of readers said they'd never knowingly sleep with a bisexual man and the editors were horrified that anyone would 'if he were very special'. They didn't mind the readers shagging anyone else.

But if you're somewhere with a significant gay sauna / 'bathhouse' scene, the only problem with having a thousand men a year is accidentally doing the same one twice a few times.

Whether or not I'd want to live for 500 years depend on my health during that time. Or if it's like the classic SF story where you get as many wishes as you like, but people miss the small print that says you have to pay for them later... except for immortality, which is free so you can work in the marble mines for the next few million years, so the next idiots get their marble palaces.

[trinsf.livejournal.com]

Some memories fade, for some people. You and I are almost exactly the same age, and have had some similar experiences. (I'm also one of the people who remembers you bemoaning in the early 90's that you had exhausted all there was to know and do about sex!) But while you may not be able to remember those past moments, I can. Not only can I, but they're incredibly vivid sense memories that I can call upon at will. I haven't touched my beloved muse Eri in 20 years, but I can remember every aspect as if she just walked out of the room.

Before you say that is about emotional engagement, I can also call the exact sensations of that one time with one guy when I was 19, or a brief workshop demo I did in 1993. For me, they *do* accumulate, just like the lyrics to songs (which I never forget if I've heard something even once -- or every detail of every room I've ever lived in. I get that for you, those sorts of things fade, but for me -- and maybe for Ebert and certainly for other people -- they don't just get murky and disappear. I'm with Ebert -- it's good and bad. It's probably the seat of some of my PTSD issues, but it also lets me savor moments that have passed. My mentor stopped smoking more than 10 years ago, but if I close my eyes, I can be sitting in the lobby of the Boston Park Plaza hotel, listening to the crackle of his cloves and watching them roll around his fingers as the smoke circles us. The 20 years intervening time evaporates any time I will it to.

[yamazakikun.livejournal.com]

Okay... I thought that sounded like Fredric Brown, but it's not him. I've definitely read this story, however. Any idea who the author is?

[lovingboth]

I was going to say it was one in a book called something like 'Short Short SF' (everything no longer than about two pages) but I just thought 'It'll be Robert Sheckley', and it is: Something for Nothing.