Memory.

Once, when I was about ten, my parents got involved into fight on the street. We were going home from my grandmother’s and there were three drunk, middle-aged man who attacked a group of students at the bus stop. My parents both rushed to separate them and to stop a fight. There were other people around and they also tried to pull fighters away. It lasted probably only for five minutes. But what I remember is an bright image of my parents standing just between these huge drunk and savage men and poor scared students trying to stop them. I remember an endless horror growing up inside me that they will kill my parents or hurt them.  I remember how sick I felt and how my whole body couldn’t stop shivering. Also I still can hear a sound of a stroke when someone kicks a human body. And it took me long time to become able to watch cruel or battle scenes in movies without closing my eyes and my ears. Because every time when I heard someone hitting a person I felt sick. The fact is that this fight wasn’t that bad and it was stopped rather fast with help of people around. That is factual memory, that’s how probably it looked for my parents or other adults who were there. But what I kept was an emotional memory, and it influenced my life a lot.

 A thing that we call “our past” consists mostly of our different emotional memories.  It’s hard to say if this “past” is truthful, if it really was the way we remember it. That’s why absolutely objective history is almost impossible, because our history is based on memory of people who lived at that time, on their emotional memory. You never know how it really was because other people might have their own (completely different from yours) memories of the same moment. Sometimes it’s interesting to see how different people catch different details and focus on different points. Sometimes it’s painful to realize that the moment you have the brightest emotions about didn’t mean anything for another person. You remember a happiness that seized you when you woke up in the morning and noticed a drawn smile face on a roof window. But your friend memories of this morning include only the fact that there was no sun and everyone fell sleepy and tired. Emotional memory can’t be impartial; it never covers the whole truth. But who knows what a truth is? And on the other hand, emotional memory colors and diversifies our past; it gives a lot of excellent materials to writers, musicians, painters and just dreamers.