Human endeavours, especially those that desire in some sense to be transformative of their surroundings rather than a merely diversionary acquiescence to the passage of time, in fact cannot depend on a simple version of memory. Human memory is--in contrast to most people's "common sense" view--deeply flawed and unreliable. It doesn't preserve the past as much as make it available for complex forms of manipulation and reworking that include biased selection, distortion, and outright omission.![]()
