July 19 2007

Text By Meera Sethi

Memory is a lens through which we refract the events of our lives, but most often we are unaware of its effects. Its rippled glass seems as smooth and transparent as the purest, stillest water, and though we feel like clear-eyed lookouts peering into the past, the truth is that we are at the mercy of our minds. We cannot see how memory distorts happiness into dis-ease or lays a hand over the creases of melancholy and folds them into contentment.

Better, then, to raise a glass at the moment of experience and gaze through its chunky curves at the present, knowing that however weird the scene may appear through this thick prism, it is only a hint of the carnival of changes our own neurons will effect in time.