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THE SKYDIVER’S FINAL THOUGHTS

Or: What are personal memories?

All the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

MARCEL PROUST, In Search of Lost Time

FOR MANY YEARS, our sister was an active skydiver. Every weekend she would set out for the skydiving field at Jarlsberg or travel to the United States or Poland to jump in large formations with hundreds of other skydivers.

Watching Tonje skydive was often a terrible experience for us. During the minutes we observed her falling from the sky we imagined her funeral, complete with flowers and the music we’d choose to play as the coffin was carried out. Even though there are few accidents in skydiving, the few that happen are gruesome. You don’t plummet toward the ground from fifteen thousand feet without it being dangerous. Every time she was about to land, we drew the deep sigh of relief that comes after holding your breath for too long. The cheeriness of the large, brightly colored parachute belies the grim reality of the accident it can cause if it doesn’t unfold or if a sudden gust of wind grabs hold of the lightweight material. Tonje’s parachute was reddish orange, like a sunset.

The plane drones so loudly on its way to jumping height that you have to shout to be heard. This Saturday, a day in July 2006, Tonje walks toward the open door of the little silver plane, a Soviet turbine machine, Antonov An-28. She positions herself on the edge. She believes all will go well; she can’t possibly think anything else or she wouldn’t throw herself out of a plane thousands of feet above the ground. Normally, it does end well; that’s the thought you cling to.

Now we’ll leave her standing there, watching the forested, billowing landscape from above, while thick clouds cast everything below her in a grayish light. The temperature hovers around sixty degrees Fahrenheit, and the summer has not yet fully set in. We’ll let her stand there for a while longer, her slender body in her red skydiving suit, her dark brown eyes, her broad smile. Just a few minutes more.

What memories would you linger on if you had only a few moments left to live and were looking back on your life? What memories are like shiny pearls in an incredibly exclusive—exclusive, because you are the only one in the world with your memories—pearl necklace of important events? What flutters across the hippocampus as you say goodbye to life? How many monarch butterflies light on your hand?

Or what if you were allowed to pick only one, as in the Japanese film After Life, where the deceased have to choose a single memory to relive, over and over, in heaven—the happiest moment of their lives. What would yours be?

Perhaps this is why people keep diaries. They don’t want the magical moments to slip away.

When blogger Ida Jackson reads through what she has written, she remembers more of those days than before, she claims. She sees and smells and hears what happened. She discovers details she otherwise would not have remembered. She is, in a sense, a collector of memories, a memory hoarder.

“It feels as if, by doing this, I lose fewer memories. There is something existential about it. I think often about death, so I want to remember everything,” Ida says. From 2007 to 2010 she wrote the award-winning blog Revolusjonært roteloft under the pen name Virrvarr; it was Norway’s third-most-visited blog. She saw it as an extension of her diary. She has kept a diary every single day since Christmas of 1999.

“Today, I got this notebook in the mail, and since my life is upside down right now, I might as well leave behind something in writing,” is how twelve-year-old Ida Jackson began her first diary. Since then, she has written herself into the long tradition of diarists and autobiographers, philosophers, poets, and authors—from St. Augustine to Karl Ove Knausgård—who have transformed their lives into books, published or not. It seems as if written language is closely connected to our wish to remember. The first Babylonian writings from over four thousand years ago were memos, trade notes, and astronomical calculations etched into ceramic plates meant to be kept for posterity.

By the year 200 CE, emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius had written what is considered the earliest well-known diary, Meditations. But long before that, Japanese courtesans and other Asian travelers were in the habit of recording their experiences in writing.

So what do we remember of our lives when we write things down, or when we don’t?

Psychology professor Dorthe Berntsen heads the Center on Autobiographical Memory Research in Aarhus, Denmark, and exclusively researches personal memories. “We remember best the period from our early teenage years into our twenties,” she tells us.

It seems that not all memories are created equal. Some are given priority. Our memories peak during our formative years (teens and early twenties), a phenomenon called the reminiscence bump. During this period of our lives, many of our experiences are new and startling; there are so many firsts, and they stay with us for the rest of our lives. Middle-aged people who are asked to recall their fondest memories typically mention something from this period of their lives, Berntsen’s research reveals. This area of psychological research is amazingly free from controversy.

But does it help if you keep a diary the way Ida Jackson does?

“Yes, it does help, but it might mean that we replace our memories with written stories,” Berntsen says.

What else helps make memories last? It turns out that several factors determine whether an experience sticks with us as a memory.

One such thing is the emotional impact of an experience. Exciting events that provoke sharp emotional highs stay with us particularly well. Whizzing toward the earth from fifteen thousand feet in the air, for example. Or a first kiss, after anticipation has been building for weeks. Another important ingredient for a lasting memory is how much it deviates from what we expect—how distinct or remarkable it is.

Many memories are similar to a number of other experiences we have had. It’s hard to tell them apart—thinking of them doesn’t remind us of one specific incident. Like all the times we take the bus to work. We have a cumulative memory of these experiences under the heading “bus trip to work.” Or all the times at the beach that have merged into “sunbathing at the beach”: that feeling of a summer breeze grazing our face while we squint at the sun. This is not a single event; it has happened many times. Every time, we have soaked up the summer warmth and wished that the moment would last forever. Caterina Cattaneo added to her memories of diving when she dived for the seventy-third time: that feeling of sinking into the dark water, the bubbles rising toward the light surface, the maneuvers with the tank she had done seventy-two times before. All of this became part of the general memory of “diving,” “diving in the Oslo Fjord,” or “winter diving.” But more exciting events remain as independent, unique memories. Like the time Caterina saw a rare marine slug for the first time, or the time she saw a seahorse in Madeira.

“The brain works with memory on two conflicting principles,” psychologist Anders Fjell, from the University of Oslo, points out. “Part of the brain’s work is to try to categorize and assimilate as many of our experiences as possible in order to save space, while the hippocampus fights to retain unique memories.”

The hippocampus is finely tuned to notice and pick up events and experiences that stand out for being different. Their uniqueness is what creates a memory trace, a shiny pearl in the necklace.

As with all other information we encounter, the more we ruminate over and talk about a unique incident, the more ingrained it becomes in memory. All the little tales about our lives that we share around the lunch table, at parties, or on Facebook—small talk—make memories stick. The paradox is that those memories then become stories in our minds more than living experiences.

Dorthe Berntsen’s research center is situated in Aarhus, Denmark. There, on top of the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, you can enjoy a view unlike anything else in the world. On the roof, artist Olafur Eliasson has installed a circular tunnel of glass in every color of the rainbow. In every direction you look, you can see spires and low-lying stone domes that date back to the 1600s in various shades of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and purple, depending on where on the roof you stand. Just as the city of Aarhus is rendered here in multiple beautiful shades, our memories are also seen through a filter: our emotions.

The fate of a memory is mostly determined by how much it means to us. Personal memories are important to us. They are tied to our hopes, our values, and our identities. Memories that contribute meaningfully to our personal autobiography prevail in our minds.

Personality and identity can also be maintained without memories. Even Henry Molaison, the man without a memory, obviously had a sense of a self. He knew who he was, even though he didn’t remember the full story of how he had become that person. Who we are is partially determined by factors like temperament and habits, and how we face the world and all its challenges. But our core memories in our own personal autobiography define us. Even if we don’t write six volumes about ourselves, as Karl Ove Knausgård has done, all of us walk around with an autobiography stored in our memory. It isn’t just a random stream of events we have experienced; our memories are structured and organized in accordance with our own life story. We are all authors.

“A life script is what we call it in memory research,” Dorthe Berntsen says. “It’s a script for how life should unfold; it structures our experiences.”

If you ask children what they want to be when they grow up, they might answer police officer, firefighter, or doctor, or maybe author, psychologist, or skydiver. In other words, they know that adult life includes a job, perhaps even marriage and children. Before we even start school, we understand that life has direction. Our life script contains expectations of how life normally looks, with milestones such as starting school, getting a driver’s license, graduating, starting a career, getting married, becoming a parent, and retiring. Gradually, as life progresses and we adjust our expectations, our life script also helps us access our memories by providing chapters we can browse in our book of life: “School,” “Marriage,” “Work,” “Skydiving.” When we activate part of the life script, we activate all the related concepts in the network it’s part of, just like marine slugs, air bubbles, flippers, and seaweed triggered undersea memories for the divers in our diving experiment. When something reminds us of our student days, we mentally travel back to the student cafeteria, making it possible for us to remember many experiences from that time, especially emotionally loaded memories—ones that stood out, that we thought about often and discussed.

“We can’t walk around remembering everything we’ve done in life all the time,” Dorthe Berntsen emphasizes. The life script gives us an overview of life. It portions out our memories. Should we search in the wrong chapter, we won’t find the memories we are looking for. Parts of our life history are therefore not always available to us right in the moment. When we enter a new chapter of life, it takes more effort to retrieve memories from an earlier chapter.

Stepping outside our life script comes at a cost, something astronaut Buzz Aldrin knows well. He was the second human in history to set foot on the Moon, an event that turned his life upside down. His personal memories are, to say the least, remarkable. There are not many who can look up at the Moon and reminisce! In one of his memoirs, he describes his lunar memories in vivid detail:

“In every direction I could see detailed characteristics of the gray ash-colored lunar scenery, pocked with thousands of little craters and with every variety and shape of rock. I saw the horizon curving a mile and a half away. With no atmosphere, there was no haze on the moon. It was crystal clear.”

As Buzz Aldrin is about to set foot on the Moon, he takes his time to absorb some of the impressions the beautiful view offers: “I slowly allowed my eyes to drink in the unusual majesty of the moon. In its starkness and monochromatic hues, it was indeed beautiful. But it was a different sort of beauty than I had ever before seen. Magnificent, I thought, then said, ‘Magnificent desolation.’” This description became the title of one of his books about the Moon landing, Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon, from 2009.

When Aldrin began training as an astronaut, he had his sights set on the Moon, and everything he did became part of a new life script that included landing on the Moon. The life script contained earlier chapters from his time serving in the air force and studying to become an engineer, the natural introductory chapters to his personal saga. But representing NASA—and perhaps becoming a large part of the United States’ Cold War identity—was not part of the original script. Aldrin dealt with the strain of being in the spotlight by consuming alcohol. In description as detailed as his memory of the Moon landing, he relates his memories of his first glasses of whiskey and the feeling of calm they brought him. Sinking into alcoholism was far less heroic than traveling to the Moon, but fighting his way out of it was equally brave. And for that, there was no script.

“How did it feel to be on the Moon?”

Buzz Aldrin has been asked that question thousands of times. It’s the world’s best opening line, one would think. To Aldrin it has become as familiar as a broken record, and he won’t answer the question any longer.

“I have wanted NASA to fly a poet, a singer, or a journalist into space—someone who could capture the emotions of the experience and share them with the world,” he writes. Still, it would be incredibly interesting to find out how his memories from the Moon have affected him through the years. Are they memories he consciously retrieves and enjoys? Does he reexperience the excitement he felt right before the Eagle touched down on the surface of the Moon? Do memories from the Moon appear spontaneously in his daily life? Does he walk on the Moon in his dreams?

Psychology professor Dorthe Berntsen examines, among other things, spontaneous memories in her research. These are memories that appear on their own, without our consciously searching for them. But how do we capture a person’s personal memories in the moment? Berntsen is interested in the average memories of ordinary people who haven’t performed extraordinary feats, in outer space or elsewhere. To research spontaneous memories, she gives her subjects a timer and a notepad to carry around with them as they’re going about their normal day-to-day activities. When an alarm sounds, she asks them to write down whatever memory comes to mind. She found that what people often remember is something their environment reminded them of. Spontaneous memories are not unlike a cat’s memory when it sees the cupboard door that once closed on its tail—and jumps. For people, though, the associations are much more complex. The environment is full of potential cues that may trigger obscure memories. The things we see, and also smell, taste, talk about, and hear—particularly music—are paths into memory.

“Remarkably often, music is mentioned as a trigger for a personal memory,” Berntsen tells us.

When her test subjects share the memories they had during the course of the day and when they had them, they point to music on the radio as a typical cue to a particular memory.

Play the music you loved listening to when you were young, and see if you are not suddenly back in the place where you first heard it. The feeling and the mood can come on so strongly that you suddenly remember smells and colors, clothes and details from your home, things you thought you had forgotten.

“Soft music began to flow from the ceiling speakers: a sweet orchestral cover version of the Beatles’ ‘Norwegian Wood.’ The melody never failed to send a shudder through me, but this time it hit me harder than ever,” is how Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood begins.

The book is a nostalgic love story woven through with symbolic meaning from the Beatles song by the same name, and the opening of the book describes the strong memories music can evoke in us. Whole landscapes and stories can appear, unbidden, in our awareness.

It is well documented that music, which speaks so directly to our feelings, is a powerful memory cue. But what about smell? The olfactory bulb, which allows us to perceive odors, is located very close to the hippocampus. We may forget it sometimes, but humans are animals, and animals depend on their sense of smell to avoid danger. Why, then, isn’t smell the best key to our personal memories? But smell is an important cue. Berntsen’s research shows that our sense of smell is particularly important early in life. Perhaps this has something to do with childhood memories being less tied to our later interpretations and stories about ourselves, allowing more room in our memories for smell, which is more immediate and sensuous. Or perhaps it is because the odors we smelled in childhood aren’t ones we encounter every day. When we get a whiff of childhood, it’s a potent trigger for a distinct memory trace, because it hasn’t been watered down daily during the years that have passed since we last smelled it. It is a time capsule which takes only a moment to send us back in time. Think about this: Can you remember the smells of your childhood home?

In Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, he opens up a world of memories when he soaks a madeleine cookie in weak tea. Taste and smell are similar gates to the land of childhood.

“Apparently, Marcel Proust’s trip into memory did not start with him eating a madeleine—a disappointingly tasteless cookie; tasty, but not distinct. Proust was eating toast, but along the way, he replaced toast with a madeleine cookie. A piece of art is more than just memories; it gives the memories a form,” says Linn Ullmann, who in her novel Unquiet explores her childhood memories and her relationship with her father, the world-renowned director Ingmar Bergman.

The path into her memories followed the winding road of free association, not the logical archival approach one might have chosen when writing an authorized biography, yet her method is the one that best mirrors the way memory works. A life history can just as easily unfold while chasing a white rabbit as by following the historian’s strict logic. Ullmann’s research period was thus not spent scouring the comprehensive archive of her father’s letters and documents, but by following her emotions and immersing herself in art and music and dance, putting herself in the right mood for the book she was about to write.

“Writing about memories is hard work; it’s more than just transcribing recollections. I used to think I couldn’t remember anything in particular from my childhood, but when I began writing I could conjure up complete episodes,” she tells us. The memories Ullmann describes in her book are malleable. They are not static archives that hold perfect representations of things she has experienced. Because memories take many forms, we can approach them in different ways.

“Like the choreographer Merce Cunningham, I am thinking about what happens as our eyes follow the motion of a body from center stage to the outer edge. When I write, a small motion can suddenly become important, and something larger can become insignificant,” she says.

In her book she describes how she celebrated Christmas the only time she ever spent it with her father. She is newly divorced, he is a recent widower. They walk through the snow from his small apartment to the Hedvig Eleonora Church in Stockholm. The snow whirls in front of their faces and around the church spire. She describes how, for a long time, she thought that he needed her because he didn’t want to spend Christmas alone. With time, her understanding of that night changed. He always celebrated Christmas alone—in fact, he preferred it that way. It was she who needed him. The memory turns itself around and becomes another memory.

“I can’t remember if the snow really fell that way. At the end of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead,’ he describes the kind of snowy weather I am talking about. I don’t know if it’s actually his snowy weather I wrote into my story. However, it doesn’t matter; things I have read and things I have experienced have blended together; I am not writing a biographically true story,” she tells us.

Why do so many authors draw on their own memories? Maybe there is something authors can teach us about memory?

“Memory is a basic survival tool. We use it to tell stories about who we are; we are our own stories. Our love stories help us build our romantic relationships. On birthdays and anniversaries, people make speeches about things we have done. We tell stories about ourselves and about each other, on a personal level, on a national level, and an international level, as cultural stories. But our memories are actually fragmented, special, and creative! Memory is a force that both creates and preserves, because it writes new stories at the same time as it maintains our lives in little time capsules. For me, as an author, it is an exciting and unreliable tool. I often remember incorrectly,” she says.

What Ullmann does is not unlike what all of us do, all of the time: we make things up, structure and transform, and suddenly our memories include things we haven’t really experienced—just read, seen, or heard. Like James Joyce’s description of snow that wove itself into the tale of the walk to Hedvig Eleonora Church. Memories are unreliable.

“I wanted to see what would happen if I allowed us to emerge in a book as though we didn’t belong anywhere else. For me it was like this: I remembered nothing, but then I came across a photograph of Georgia O’Keeffe that reminded me of my father. I began to remember. I wrote: ‘I remember,’ and felt unnerved by how much I had forgotten. I have some letters, some photographs, some scattered scraps of paper, but I can’t say why I kept precisely those scraps rather than others, I have six recorded conversations with my father, but by the time we did the interviews he was so old that he had forgotten most of his own and our shared history. I remember what happened, I think I remember what happened, but some things I have probably made up, I recall stories that were told over and over again and stories that were told only once, sometimes I listened, other times I listened with only half an ear, I lay out all the pieces next to each other, lay them on top of each other, let them bump up against each other, trying to find a direction,” Linn Ullmann writes in Unquiet, almost as a report on how she has used memory as a method.

The debate about what autobiographical fiction really is, compared to autobiography, has been going on for a long time—long before Karl Ove Knausgård wrote My Struggle. But the raw material in both cases consists of memories. In autobiographical fiction, memory triumphs over hard sources and personal experience has greater value than objective fact. Memory, with all its creative misinterpretation, gets top priority.

“I discovered that memory isn’t a locked trunk full of true recollections, but a creative sponge—it absorbs everything around it and renews itself,” says Ullmann.

Ullmann’s book is an exploration of the conundrum of constructive memory. What is actually true of what she remembers? While her father was alive, he talked to her about Bach’s cello suites and described the saraband, one of the movements, as being like a painful dance between two people. Ullmann’s book was inspired by their conversations about Bach. The book has six parts, just like the six parts of Bach’s fifth cello suite.

In her book, Ullmann writes: “To remember is to look around, again and again, equally astonished every time.” She probably wasn’t aware of how right she was from a scientific point of view. Our personal memories are always reinventing themselves; new details are added all the time. She says that turning her memories into a novel involved both artistry and hard work. “Nothing is more boring than listening to someone who has just woken up tell you about a dream. It only means something to the one telling it. A dream can be an interesting experience, but it’s not art. It is the structure that makes it into something more,” she says. Memories, too, need conscious elaboration to become literature. What she thought of as a fragment of a memory might have become several pages as she reconstructed it factually and artistically. The title of Unquiet may very well allude to the fundamental nature of memory. Memories are not static, not authoritative, not solid as mountains. They are diffuse, they move around, they collide; they are like seahorses dancing restlessly amid the seagrass. Memory is constructive; it picks up fragments of an experience and builds a framework, a story about what happened. Once, that experience was fresh in our minds. But our senses, our attention, our ability to interpret, and our memory did not manage to absorb everything down to the smallest detail. Still, when that memory is retrieved, it seems as if it is intact. The memory itself becomes a new moment in consciousness, although as from a parallel reality. But beyond our perception, both hard work and artistic effort lie behind each memory.