Imagination and Memory

I remember a sense of unreality when we came back to Iloilo after a visit to Manila. I was maybe four or five years old. I sniffed the inside of our suitcases as my mother or the maid took the clothes out that we brought back from the trip. I imagined I could smell the aromas of that other place that now resided only in memories. Smelling them I tried to convince myself that other place was real.

Back then I already distrusted memory. Memory was someplace else and some other time. The child begins to differentiate here from there, then from now. In his developing sense of dichotomies he senses the idea of worlds rather than just one world. Each world comprises its own reality.

It was simpler then. The child didn’t have to choose between worlds. He could live in memories instead of the evidence his physical senses were constructing for him in the moment. And he discovers an even more powerful faculty of mind: imagination.

Between imagination and memory there is often not a great deal of difference. Equipped with these, a person awakens to the possibilities of fiction, thence to literature and art, philosophy and theology. The child grows into a man.