A Solution to Heartache: Memory

When we lose love, we may at points hear from well-meaning friends (perhaps those older than us) that we should take comfort from the thought that ‘at least we tasted proper love once in our lives.’ In moments of acute pain, when we are grappling with memory and heartbreak, this seems, at best, rather mediocre fare.

It’s true; we had love – it might have lasted six months, or four years or fifteen – but the agony isn’t that love didn’t happen, it’s that we don’t have it any longer.

Our sadness, though deeply understandable, reveals an implicit and rather unhelpful prejudice around happiness. A nice thing that once occurred but no longer does so cannot – we believe – be of any use to us. Our only plausible source of satisfaction stems from events that unfold in the present. The past – stored in memory – cannot bring any realistic solace or delight.

Our Prejudice Against the Past

It may be useful to observe our unfair prejudice against memory in other, perhaps less contentious, areas of life. Take, for example, travel. Our societies continually urge us to take off again to new lands. We might have gone to Greece in the early summer. Now it’s late autumn and the adverts for another trip don’t stop hounding us in our digital feeds. Maybe we saw Paris five years ago; it’s surely time to make our way there again.

We can see the commercial advantages of this approach; an economy that downgrades memory and privileges new experiences keeps airlines busy. But it may be doing our minds a great disservice.

Our memories are – in reality – exquisite machines for capturing and preserving pleasant events. Almost nothing about them is lost. If we were to sit down in a quiet place and re-evoke our trip to Greece, every element would be there for us. We’d find the trip from the airport to the little hotel, that first morning looking out at the Parthenon, the cypress tree in the garden, the bench by the souvlaki stand, the sky on the last evening. We could even proceed systematically down the menu that we sampled in the restaurant by the cove. One memory has a habit of revealing another. Once we remember the corridor in the hotel room, we can quickly summon up the buffet, the bathroom and the trip to the market. Everything remains, waiting for us to find the energy, desire and confidence to go back.

Nevertheless, a deep suspicion exists around spending too long in memory. We’d cause consternation if we explained that we’d spent ten minutes ‘re-eating’ a meal from the Heraclitus café in Rhodes or re-climbing some steps to an antique shop in a backstreet on Paros.

But our pleasures in doing so are at once legitimate and intense. Memories have a raft of advantages over their originals. They can be accessed at low cost at any time. They are free of distraction. We can see a temple without the slight stomach ache that accompanied us when we were physically present, or without the worry set off by an email we read just as we left the taxi, or without the more general free-floating anxiety about what would happen next that smears our enjoyment of any moment in real time.

Memory and Heartbreak

What is true of travel applies no less to love. We are undeniably now on our own – and may never again have the sort of love we treasured. But the entire story has been preserved. It happened once and it cannot be taken from us. The first evening is still there in encyclopaedic detail: the way they hesitated before the kiss, the colour of the wall in the restaurant, the message they sent when they reached home… We could write out the whole first year in longhand and it would fill a book.

We don’t go back because doing so lacks prestige. A Meditation on Past Love sounds as unholy as a Meditation on a Trip to Bruges four years ago. Only the present exists. We can be tortured by memory; we need to rediscover its capacity to return to us what time has stolen and what the present cannot provide.

We crave new happiness for a poignant reason: not because we lack happy experiences, but because we forget them (that is, we forget to remember them deeply and expansively). If we could only recognise it, the power of our minds would seem magical. We can so easily return to our youth, float in the sea off Marseilles, have a Sachertorte in Vienna and unpack a Lego kit when we were seven. We can resample that perfect salad we had in Puglia four years ago. And, when grief strikes, we can re-experience most of what made our love so special and so delightful. In this way, memory and heartbreak need not remain adversaries. The more we remember, the less the present can hurt us.