33. Epilogue

For the next 40 years I enjoyed an extraordinarily happy marriage and working life. Some of this time has been spent researching how memory changes as we age. This memoir cannot be justified as a part of, or as a footnote to useful scientific discussion of formal, psychological research on memory. One of my excuses for writing is that, as we grow really old much of our everyday consciousness becomes a re-play of memories from different times of our lives. I thought it might be useful to try to organise, to critique and try to learn something from these involuntary recollections than to passively accept them as the free Netflix of an ageing mind. Unfortunately, for me, tries at organised rummaging found no unexpected patterns in thousands of recollections.

After I showed signs of giving up writing about some of my past, my wonderful wife, Dorothy, astutely saw that I needed some pretend-business to simulate the routines of my former working life. When I lost impetus, she began to prod and pace me with discoveries of photos from family collections and from Web-troves.

As we grow old, the theatre of the mind becomes the only show in town. Its extempore performances convince me that, in our old age, our everyday consciousness is mostly fabricated from memories. When we are young, the main task of consciousness seems to be a mental GPS, navigating us along routes of fuzzy recollections of “What do I do next?” and “How can I manage it?” In our youth, memories of an incoherent past do often sneak into attention, whether or not we actively search for them, but, as we age, the cumulating debris of lengthening life are not just haphazardly intrusive but increasingly take over our self-consciousness and become the basis of our vivid feeling of being alive.

I do not know whether the Hindi word Kul, which means both today and yesterday, is a linguistic accident or signals an important discovery about our experience of time. We can only guess tomorrow. We try to reconstruct an increasingly dubious yesterday by archaeology of mind-litter.

We know from elementary neurology that all of our memories are records made, stored and played out by nerve cells in our brains. Like all of the trillion trillions of other cells in our bodies, our neurons have been fabricated from the inert stuff of the world. Mr Spargot, a Latin Master, trying to provoke a flicker of interest in Caesar’s Gallic Wars, used to tell his pupils, that every one of us incorporates in our bodies a few of Julius’ former atoms. We used to joke that Mr Spargot was crammed with Neanderthal molecules (recent DNA sampling has shown that this is precisely true). Spargot was also on the ball because all of our bodies, including our living brains, are made up not only of some molecules inherited from our biological ancestors but of material left behind by other organic things, such as the millions of non-human single-celled creatures that inhabit us as their world, and the residues of the plants and of unlucky beasts that we once ate. In their turn, all of their and our molecules were made of stuff that has been around for longer than we can comprehend. The neurons that play out our memories when they are activated are self-assembled from millennia of rubbish: Ammonite atoms, perhaps even Pterodactyl parts, Brontosaurus bits, Diplodocus-droppings, and Mammoth-mess All of this all of which once was unliving star-dust that swirled about for the billions of years since the Biggest Bang of All, and became part of a violent and fiery proto-Earth, then baked through endless Cretaceous and Jurassic summers and froze in appalling ice. Each individual cell in our bodies and brains is stuff that can never have any knowledge of being part of a “self” any more than the metal components of a lap-top computer can “experience” the programs that it stores and runs. To transcribe some of my self-programs into web-electrons is to transfer them to yet another inanimate medium. So, over unimaginable periods of kul, we could not sense or care about being inert stuff and we can be certain that we cannot relish, resent or realise the next kul of nothing at all.