memory
English, from Latin · memoria
Memory is how a mind has a past, and how a self claims to be the same one.
- memoria
- the faculty and the store (Latin)
Morphology
Latin memoria, from the Indo-European root that also gives mourn and remember. To remember is to bring the limbs back together, or to be mindful again.
Semantic range
Faculty, store, commemoration, reconstruction, digital storage.
History of the word
Augustine’s palaces, the art of memory, Bergson’s two memories, the clinic of amnesia, the jay’s caches, the computer’s store. We keep using rooms and warehouses. The metaphors leak.
Associated traditions
Parallels, not equivalents. Different attempts to notice something about knowing.
Greek
mnēmē / anamnēsis
Memory, and Plato’s recollection as a knowing that is a remembering.
A distant linguistic echo
anamnesis
Greek · A stronger claim: learning as recollection. See the plate.
How the word shifts
Digital memory is indifferent storage. Human memory is a reconstruction that can be true enough to live by and false enough to wound. Anesthesia sometimes erases the second without asking the first.
storage
Reconstruction, mourning, the claim that a self continues.
A story where the word matters
- The Palaces of MemoryHippo Regius · c. 397–400
- The Thief Who Remembers Being a ThiefWestern oak woodlands, and Cambridge aviaries · 1990s–2000s
- When the Lights Go OutOperating theaters everywhere · 1846 to now
- The Hours, UncutWestminster · 1925
- Star of GladnessHonolua Bay, Maui, then the ocean toward Tahiti · 1976
Nearby words
Neighbors, not translations of one concept.
From this word
When you remember, is the past retrieved, or composed again in the present?
One question remains
What does this word let us notice that English “consciousness” does not?
It lets us notice that a past is made as much as it is kept.