To begin to become intimate with the processes that comprise and accomplish what we call memory is vastly more like religion and science fiction than it is ‘rational’ or superficially mechanical.

The seeming rationality of memory’s functions and outputs have little to do with the processes whereby their precursors are established, made orderly to access, and maintained.

Direct experience of the activity of these processes, as might be had were they to become conscious, is astonishing beyond language’s capacities to convey. Memory’s mirrored waters are far more strange and deep than we moderns imagine. And even the self is, in a sense, but a reflection upon their surface…