Every once in a while, you experience a moment that is worthy of preservation, a moment that you can't help but recognize as having genuinely authentic content. You take it all in, you take pictures with your mind's eye, you smell the roses, and then the moment is gone. It can be depressing to say goodbye to that moment, to see it as just another lifeless representation of a meaningful event, which you place on the shelf of your memory, next to all the others as they collect dust. It can be saddening to consign that memory to the role of acquaintance rather than friend.
But those memories are never lifeless, not for an instant. They're never absent. Far from being dusty photographs in the museum of your life, they are like new colors that you experience, that become permanent fixtures of how you see the world. That genuinely authentic moment is with you always, because you absorbed it into your whole outlook. That memory is part of who you are now, part of what makes up your facticity and its vibrancy will forevermore color what new experiences become apparent to you.
The memories you accumulate are not there now as a solid, tangible thing you can experience, but they are no less real. And if you can have faith that they are there, defining every subsequent moment of your existence, these memories have all their fondly remembered potency, only now they are drawn infinitely closer to your heart.
This is the Idiot, signing out.
