We have a collection of watches that, over the years, have stopped working. Some were inexpensive and a few weren’t, but they all stopped for the same reason: their batteries ran out. Power failure will get us all in the end. I brought them to a watch repair shop up on the Strand that seems to have been there since the days of George V; now they’re all alive and ticking.
Their sudden transplantation from just before whatever moment they almost saw, straight into July 31 2019, 3:45 pm, made me think of this blog and the last moment I touched it, back in 2013.
Some of the words that were transplanted across that gap seem strange to me. They're someone else’s stories, written in someone else’s words. I honestly don’t remember who it was that showed me their third nipple, nor when, nor where. But others seemed just as familiar to me today as they did in those moments when I wrote them.
So that got me wondering: if we could preserve a moment - a child’s birth, a first kiss, any moment of pure joy whatever its origin - would we recognise it when we looked back on it in later years? Would it feel just as it did when we first experienced it, or would it seem unfamiliar, like someone else's memory?
I went for a curry with my friend Richard tonight, to a restaurant near Canary Wharf where we used to work. I realized that I’ve been visiting the Tale of India since my first trip to London in 1999. It’s changed some over the years - a bit of new paint, an updated menu about 8 years ago - but some of the same people have been there all along. They always remember me and greet me as a regular, even though I haven’t worked in the Wharf since before my last post here, and although I now only visit maybe once or twice a year. Every time I go, though, it’s like I never left. I'm part of its story, and it's part of mine.
If we could preserve a moment forever, leave it untouched and ready to be examined on demand, should we? Wouldn't that distance it from us, make it strange and unrecognizable? And would we preserve only the good ones? What about the awful ones - don't they bear revisiting and examination too, as a catalyst for growth? Maybe our moments - whether of sublime joy or of abject despair or anything in between - shouldn’t be preserved at all. Maybe we should carry them around with us instead, not as baggage, but as an integral part of ourselves; each one an atom that, when taken together, make us who we are.
Maybe it’s from all those joyful, painful moments that we’re really constructed, and maybe it's only by consciously embracing them, by integrating them rather than keeping them as separate things, that we can experience them continuously.
