I am at that age where my friends are getting married. This Labor Day Weekend I traveled to California to attend a dear friend’s wedding. For this one, I was invited to be one of the groomsmen. One of us was assigned the role of a videographer to document messages by each of us to the bride and groom. The videographer would then compile the short messages into a well produced video for posterity.
Here was an intentional exercise in thinking as a remembering self. It is not enough to have a good time, one is concerned with the business of making memories. The experience of reconnecting with old friends, to share the joy with the newly weds, to experience exquisite food, to share tears with the bride as she recollects her memories. These are all necessary, but not sufficient. We record, we document, we make memories. We craft memories for the future: we take photographs with vintage cameras, we get drones in the sky to document the whole event from unusual perspectives, we hire professional wedding photographers to capture idealized moments.
The whole enterprise is an effort to inter-twine the experiencing self and the remembering self. As Daniel Kahneman points out, these may never reconcile. The memory of a past that is not exactly what happened.