Why I Fear Amnesia And The Gods

When I travel I make a point to imprint my experiences with unfamiliar music.

Once, years ago, I was listening to a song when I was walking around in an old church in Paris. And now, whenever it comes on, I stop whatever I'm doing and sit there and listen to it. The imprint is gorgeous and irreplaceable.

Memories are rarified and peculiar collisions. Consider this what's happening: the clarity of sentiment for a musician to record a song fused to the atmospheric lighting and ambient temperatures of the setting where the song is heard within a building constructed by a multiple of hands in a bygone era. And you have happened to stumble upon these conditions serendipitously, at a particular chapter in your life, while the world and the societies within it were barreling towards an outcome inconclusive. All this context striking within a instant of notice, seared into your network of neurons. An elevated convergence that moves you so vividly that you would mourn its loss as profoundly as losing a love deigned never to return. That shape of mood within a moment. Not just musical brilliance, nor history nor climate nor circumstance nor biology but all of these intertwined and nestled into your conscious and subconscious minds, incapable of specific articulation but resoundingly and inimitably recorded.

Defer to the Gods: they could cast the fog of amnesia upon your consciousness, revoking such a immaculate and gifted moment from recall. And you would have no recourse.