Memory - Milan Kundera

"Memory cannot be understood, either, without a mathematical approach. The fundamental given is the ratio between the amount of time in the lived life and the amount of time from that life that is stored in memory. No one has ever tried to calculate this ratio, and in fact there exists no technique for doing so; yet without much risk of error I could assume that the memory retains no more than a millionth, a hundred-millionth, in short an utterly infinitesimal bit of the lived life. That fact too is part of the essence of man. If someone could retain in his memory everything he had experienced, if he could at any time call up any fragment of his past, he would be nothing like human beings: neither his loves nor his friendships nor his angers nor his capacity to forgive or avenge would resemble ours.

We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it cannot fail to be), but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or our interests. We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed." ~ Milan Kundera

不用數學計算，回憶也是不能被理解的，基本定出那是生命長短與回憶裏的生命的比率，沒有人嘗試計算這個比率，實際上也無法計算，我可以在沒有多大風險的情況下假設回憶保留不大於百萬分之一以上，百萬分之一，簡單來説就是生命裏極其微少的部分，這也就是人的本質。如果有人可以保留他的記憶，他經歷過的每件事，如果他能在任何時間呼喚他過去的任何片段，他不是人類：不管他的愛還是他的友誼，不管他的憤怒還是他寬恕和報復的能力都與我們的相似。

我們不斷批評那些歪曲，重寫，僞造自己過去，或是誇大某件件的重要性而不提另一事件的人；這樣批評是公正的，但如果在此之前我們不對人的記憶本身進行批評，他们就不重要。因爲人的記憶，可憐的記憶，最後能做些甚麼？它只能留住過去可憐的一小部分，没人知道為甚麽留住的恰恰是這一部分，而不是另一部分，我們每個人都神秘地進行這一選擇，超越我們的意志和興趣。如果我們竭力排除下面這一最爲明顯的道理我們將無法理解人的生命：事實已非當時模樣；還原是不可能的。