We often ‘reflect’ in an attempt to recall past events. When we do so, we find ourselves having to ‘refresh our memory’, to retrieve what we have ‘stored in our memory’; and that is ‘if our memory serves us right’, with a greater chance of success if we have ‘learnt it by heart’.
At the very core of the human being lies the awareness of being and of having been, and, therefore, of recalling one’s life experiences and making sense of them to guide us into the future. Beyond being a psychological faculty of recollection, memory is, in truth, the foundation of ‘historical reason’—that which Ortega y Gasset paid such close attention to, and by which we distinguish the memory-rich human being from the (almost) amnesiac orangutan. Hence, we can have a ‘record’ (medical, academic, police, digital, etc.), and we are able to construct biographical or historical narratives, depending on whether the focus is on an individual or a collective. [...]
