Noel’s Reviews > Matter and Memory > Status Update

The most interesting thing in the last chapter—the most interesting in the book so far—is Bergson’s rejection of the question of where memories are stored. For Bergson: (1) there’s no real distinction between the present and the past—we inhabit an indivisible and heterogenous movement, which he calls “duration”; (2) our thought, like the universe itself, is continually existing, and thus its…

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Sorry, I haven’t been checking my feed at all the past couple weeks. I’ll probably be able to get caught up soon. I had a really nice time in Vancouver. I met up with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. We explored the UBC campus and took the bus downtown the next day. We went to the Vancouver Art Gallery and saw a Nan Goldin exhibit and explored Davie Street (Vancouver’s gay village). I also had a Japadog :)

“You define the present in an arbitrary manner as that which is, whereas the present is simply what is being made. Nothing is less than the present moment, if you understand by that the indivisible limit which divides the past from the future. When we think this present as going to be, it exists not yet, and when we think it as existing, it is already past. If, on the other hand, what you…”

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“To picture is not to remember. No doubt a recollection, as it becomes actual, tends to live in an image; however, the converse is not true, and the image, pure and simple, will not be referred to the past unless, indeed, it was in the past that I sought it, thus following the continuous progress which brought it from darkness into light. This is what psychologists too often forget when…”

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