Tuesday, February 6, 2007

memory versus recollection

One may be born with the potential for a prodigious memory, but one is not born with a disposition to recollect; this comes only with changes and separations in life – separations from people, from places, from events and situations, especially if they have been of great significance, have been deeply hated or loved...

Discontinuity and nostalgia are most profound if, in growing up, we leave or lose the place where we were born and spent our childhood, if we become expatriates or exiles, if the place, or the life, we were brought up in is changed beyond recognition or destroyed.

- An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks

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