Overall, I felt this reading had some interesting parts hidden among the sea of text, however the majority of it was a bit dry. There were a few parts of the essay that grabbed my attention and posed a new way to view the definition and/or impact of personal narrative.
On page 21, the authors state, "We immediately transform the present moment into its abstraction. We need only recount an episode we experienced a few hours ago: the dialogue contracts to a brief summary, the setting to a few general features." While some may view this lack of remembering as a negative thing, I personally appreciate these gaps of white space in memory. I feel that it gives us a chance to participate and to recreate our own versions of experiences we had no control over in the first place. It allows room for interpretation and individuality to seep through moments that have become imposed on us.
Another thing that struck me while reading this essay is how we tell memories in the past tense of language. I now wonder why we use the past tense because as we are telling these stories of things that have happened, we are currently recreating the moment in our minds. Therefore, should we not describe memories in the present tense, as we are reliving them currently, not in the physical but in the psychological medium?
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