It goes without saying that my portrait of Carol was of a coarser grain than her own; how could it not be? I didn’t grow up in her family, didn’t attend her schools, didn’t live through her childhood or adolescence. And yet, over our many years together, through thousands of hours of casual and intimate conversations, I had imported lower-resolution copies of so many of the experiences central to her identity. Carol’s memories of her youth — her parents, her brothers and sisters, her childhood collie Barney, the family’s “educational outings” to Gettysburg and to museums in Washington D.C., their summer vacations in a cabin on a lake in central Michigan, her adolescent delight in wildly colorful socks, her preadolescent loves of reading and of classical music, her feelings of differentness and isolation from so many kids her age — all these had imprinted my brain with copies of themselves, blurry copies but copies nonetheless. Some of her memories were so vivid that they had become my own, as if I had lived through those days. Some skeptics might dismiss this outright, saying, “Just pseudo-memories!” I would reply, “What’s the difference?”
A friend of mine once told me about a scenic trip he had taken, describing it in such vivid detail that a few years later I thought I had been on that trip myself. To add insult to injury, I didn’t even remember my friend as having had anything to do with “my” trip! One day this trip came up in a conversation, and of course we both insisted that
In the end, what is the difference between actual, personal memories and pseudo-memories? Very little. I recall certain episodes from the novel
Transplantation of Patterns
Even if most readers agree with much that I am saying, perhaps the hardest thing for many of them to understand is how I could believe that the activation of a symbol inside my head, no matter how intricate that symbol might be, could capture any of someone else’s
The key question is thus very simple and very stark: Does the actual hardware matter? Did only