Memory is the diary that we all carry around with us
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
Topic
Wilde's memory-as-diary is the opening thesis: we all carry our edited, curated, self-authored past with us everywhere. Karr's inversion — we can invent only with memory — makes memory not just storage but generative: the materials of imagination are always already memories recombined. Cato the Younger's greatest comfort in old age being the pleasing remembrance of good actions closes the ethical loop: memory is where virtue accumulates interest. Stael-Holstein on love effacing all memory of beginning is the romantic claim that the deepest experiences are the ones that erase their own starting point. Hugo's trinity — intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant — is the most architecturally interesting entry: memory does the labor that the other faculties live by. What the collection suggests is that memory is not passive. It is the medium in which character is formed, regret is earned, and the self continues to exist between the moments when it is most fully itself.
Memory is the diary that we all carry around with us
'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting,