The End Of Remembering And Susan Griffin's Our Secret

Throughout "Our Secret" Griffin explores the different characters' fears and secrets and she gives specific insights into these "secrets". Through examining others Griffin comes to terms with her own feelings, secrets, and fears. She relates to Himmler, Leo, Helene, and everyone else even though she is different than all of them. One fact that can be made about all of these characters is that they all represent humans and human emotion

Throughout the essay “Our secret” by Susan Griffin, Griffin talks about a few characters’ fears, secrets and she gives us insights into these “secrets”. Griffin comes to realize her own secrets and fears by examining others. She relates to a few of the characters such as Himmler, Leo, Helene and everyone else even though she is different than all of them. The only thing that all of these characters have in common is that they all represent human emotion. Susan Griffin reveals that everyone has a hidden side to them and anything being showed on the outside could be fake or a false representation of themselves. “I think of it now as a kind of mask, not an animated mask that expresses the essence of an inner truth, but a mask that falls like dead weight over the human face.” (Griffin 237) This quote explains what she means about secrets being the barrier to others’ feelings and having this mask hides what you really feel on the inside.

Anyone reading Joshua Foer’s “The End of Remembering” can assume that he knows a lot about the brain and how it works. After all he graduated from Yale in 2004, and later went on to become the 2006 United States Memory Champion. With Foer’s interest in mental athletes he decided to do a journalism project to study them. This project would end up being the result of his book, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything from which “The End of Remembering” is one of the chapters. In this chapter Foer’s lays a solid foundation of the development of writing. He also includes historical views of remembering and how we learned in terms of our memory. Foer not only gives historical views but supports his claims with science

The 1994 dystopian novel The Memory Police, captures a dull and sorrowful narrative on an isolated island where memories are systematically stripped away by superior forces. Throughout the text, Ogawa illustrates how the novel paints a chilling narrative where individuals are deprived of their free will to resist or to succeed. However, through significant ideas and themes, the author encapsulates the possibility to resist and triumph. Ogawa explores this through the consequences that significant characters face in resistance to a totalitarian regime, she also demonstrates this through the symbol of disappearances and how they play a vital role in individuality. Although the author illustrates that the novel is a dystopian novel that prevents

Despite the use of humor, the speaker of “Forgetfulness” establishes both a melancholic and deeply reflective tone in order to analyze both the inevitability of forgetfulness and the heartache that comes with it. Employing humor, Collins appeals to his audience and conveys the universal experience of forgetting memories as you grow older, “well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those / who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle” (18-19). The speaker humorously contradicts the old bicycle cliché that states that once you learn how to ride it, you never forget. According to the speaker, however, you do forget. And if you can forget how to ride a bicycle, you can certainly forget everything else. In no time, you will be blindly sinking into oblivion, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. On the surface, the speaker’s musings appear quite humorous. However, Collins’ words reveal an undeniable truth about the human condition -- that growing older and forgetfulness are inevitable. The speaker continues to emphasize this idea by comparing life itself to an individual trying to remember a book they once read:

quote from the chapter “Spin” in the book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, brings

Loftus and Palmer support the reconstructive memory hypothesis. They believe that information gathered at the time of an icident is

For this essay I aim to show the importance of memory and of remembering the past in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid’s Tale is a ‘speculative fiction’ first published in 1985 but set in the early 2000s. The novel was in response to changes in US politics with the emergence of Christian fundamentalism, the New Right. Atwood believed that society was going wrong and wrote this savage satire, similar to Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’, depicting a dystopia which she uses as a mirror to hold up to society. I will be focusing on the main character and narrator, Offred, “a handmaid who mingles memories of her life before the revolution with her rebellious activities under the new regime” (book group corner), as she

The author’s purpose was arguing that people’s memories could explain the facts in their life. McGlone wanted to let reader knew that memories was a key to solve some mysterious things. In this essay, he argued that recent advances in cognitive psychology have cracked open a code book that historians can use, even on memories two hundred years old.

Repression of memories is a psychological concept that has haunted modern psychology for years. Repression of memories also known as “rememory” defined by the mind pushing away traumatic or shocking experiences into a dark corner of a person’s unconscious. As this idea developed and began to be studied more thoroughly, slavery became an institution in which researchers saw promise in drawing conclusions about the dangers of repressing memories. In Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, the character narratives of Paul D and Sethe exemplify the dangers of repressing memories. Both disconnect from and push away unwanted emotional traumas or experiences from their past. However, this effort doesn’t pay off and their repression of memories is not successful. Through the use of symbols such as Paul D’s tobacco tin and Sethe’s scars and lost child, Morrison demonstrates how repression of the past isn’t effective and how it always comes back to haunt a person who doesn’t correctly cope with their trauma. Paul D and Sethe live unfulfilled lives as a result of repressed memories.

In recent years there has been a hot debate between "repressed" vs. "false" memories. Neurobiological studies show that both suppression and recall and the creation of false memories are possible. This paper evaluates the evidence but forth by both sides of the controversy and concludes that both are feasible and separate phenomenon, which occur at significant rates in our society.

Naturally, life is a continuous cycle of experience and learning. Yet often times so much is buried in our lives that we fail to remember or recall what we have learned. Memories that range from miniscule facts to important emotions can often leave unknowingly from our mind. Billy Collin’s “Forgetfulness” shows how memories are delicate and fragile, and that the process of forgetting is one that is nonchalant. Billy Collins effectively blends subtle humor and irony with a dramatic tone shift to explain that ideas and facts that people think are important flee the mind, showing that nothing good can last. Although he refers to memories in a lighthearted, thoughtful manner, the poem gradually shifts (just

Before considering whether or not memories affect our reality, it may be useful to offer a definition of the term ‘reality’. If we are to

Memory is something all humans struggle with. A person’s memory is everything. It shapes the entirety of a person’s being. The fear of losing your memory is a uniquely human phenomenon, and to some degree I believe it must haunt every person. In these two poems, both titled “Forgetfulness”, two poets explore the idea of losing yourself and being human. Although their voices are very different, and the techniques which they employ to get their message across, the topic of the poems is the same. The truth is that forgetfulness is a many-headed beast, and it’s entirely valid that two different viewpoints could explore different aspects of it. Hart Crane’s poem focuses on the image of forgetfulness, the effect it has on humanity as a whole, and

Memory makes us. It is, to an extent, a collection of unique and personal experiences that we, as individuals, have amassed over our lifetime. It is what connects us to our past and what shapes our present and the future. If we are unable remember the what, when, where, and who of our everyday lives, our level of functioning would be greatly impacted. Memory is defined as or recognized as the “sum or total of what we remember.” Memory provides us the ability to learn and adjust to or from prior experiences. In addition, memory or our ability to remember plays an integral role in the building and sustaining of relationships. Additionally, memory is also a process; it is how we internalize and store our external environment and experiences. It entails the capacity to remember past experiences, and the process of recalling previous experiences, information, impressions, habits and skills to awareness. It is the storage of materials learned and/or retained from our experiences. This fact is demonstrated by the modification, adjustment and/or adaptation of structure or behavior. Furthermore, we as individuals, envision thoughts and ideas of the present through short-term memory, or in our working memory, we warehouse past experiences and learned values in long-term memory, also referred to as episodic or semantic memory. Most importantly, memory is malleable and it is intimately linked to our sense of identity and where we believe we belong in the world.