“I’m always going back to foolish,
embarrassing or shameful things I did long ago and dwelling on them endlessly,
even if they’re things no-one but me remembers.”
“Ugh, I know just what you mean. I used
to see a therapist who tried to turn that perversity of my memory back against
itself, told me to invent false memories in which I did the right thing. I
balked at the idea of intentionally falsifying my memories, I pointed out that
I was hardly anything but the sum total of my memories, so if my memories were
false, what was I? His counterargument was that since nobody but me remembered
that moment, what was the harm in changing how I remembered it?”
“So what did you do?”
“Well, soon after I had to stop
seeing him for completely unrelated reasons, but I think I would have had to
stop seeing him on account of that issue. The idea of intentionally creating
false memories, even if they were sitting in a drawer labelled ‘Comforting
False Memories’, just kind of creeps me out.”
“I don’t know. I think we all have
that drawer. I think we all fantasize about rewriting our past lives to make
them come out better, even if it’s only through reading stories about people
who have better childhoods or more successful college days than we do.”
“Well, maybe so. But there’s a
point right there: when it’s a story about someone else’s life, it’s enough
like your life that you can identify with the character, but it’s different
enough from your own life that you’re not in danger of starting to believe that
what happens to the character is what happened to you.”
“I’ve read stories in which people
read overinflated hagiographic books about them and begin to believe that’s
what happened to them.”
“Ohhh, that’s creepy.”
“Well, it’s usually played for
laughs.”
“Yeah, but the sort of person who
gets books like that written about them is usually someone in a position of
power. So if, say, a combat veteran rides fame in war to political office, and
comes to believe that his inflated heroism is real, his ego could run out of
control, and lead to crazy risk-taking in Congress, or the White House. Creepy.”
“Good point. I also recall a story
in which a General was constantly narrating everything he did in purple prose
to a stenographer who hurriedly wrote it all down.”
“Eek.”
The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Slowly, he tapped away at his keyboard...."
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/150045/the-gentle-art-of-shabby-dressing
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