Bullet Points and Blog Posts
On our way out to Mount Rushmore, I found myself reflecting on the moment at hand. Nearly halfway through the trip, I had never really stopped to think about what exactly I was doing.
Here I was in a car with five classmates and a professor, being driven toward a national monument. We were on day 19 of a 40 day trip that no other school has taken, involving great food, great talks, great people, great culture, and no sleep. And listening to The Flaming Lips and trying to picture which presidential carving would sing which part of each song, imagining their jaws moving like ventriloquist dummies and bickering over whether Lincoln or Roosevelt would take the tenor part.
Mine is not a normal educational experience.
I thought about the last few weeks and realized with a saddening heart that already the memories are fading. Already I struggle to catch every moment and experience like I could at the beginning of the trip. Already it is harder to instantly bring to mind the places we saw in the early days of this trip. Some of that may be the short term effects of sleep deprivation, but the sad tragedy of a trip like this is that we’ve done so much, and seen so much, it is hard to fit it all in. To process it all and file it away. Memories will fade until all I remember is what is written in blog posts.
As I mourned the fading clarity of this incredible trip, we passed a new memorial, so to speak. Three white plaster busts of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and George W. Bush stood in a grouping just off the road. Each bust about ten feet tall, they were surrounded by American flags and plaques honoring their contributions to history.
Jokes were made in the car about defacing the Republican statues, especially that of Ronald Reagan. Despite his huge popularity in the eighties and his continued adulation from many conservative groups, dissension from his iconic image has become common within circles that are more liberal. This was the case for some of my fellow passengers.
For me, it got me thinking again. About how history warps memory. How quickly opinions change. How quickly the truth fades. I wondered if opinion would shift for the three presidents at the roadside memorial, just as opinions have shifted for each of the four presidents on the mountain. I wondered what history would decide about our recent leaders, and especially how President Obama will be written in history.
We drove on toward Roosevelt, Jefferson, Washington, and Lincoln and I promised myself to try and remember this trip, instead of just record it. To truly experience each place we go to, and to fully appreciate the people I’m with along the way, because eventually history will be written, and it’ll be sure to differ from my own viewpoint. I want the memory before it’s carved in stone.
4 comments:
Good point!
"Flaming Lips"?? I am so old :I
Heather this is REALLY interesting... there's a poem I'll have to dig out somewhere about a man seeing his vacation through the lens of a camera. It's really interesting to think about how memory constructs (and even, to use your word, distorts) our understandings of things as simple as family vacations and as complex as wars, presidencies, etc. I think you've hit upon a really important point here, one that is foundational to the public nature of these blog entries. What will we remember, and why? Will we remember the sounds of the air-conditioning kicking on or the way a t-shirt felt against our necks or the indignation of seeing those three presidents (or the pride or the humor)? We're all on sensory overload all the time, and our memories temper that by having us only remember certain pieces.
Oh Memory...so easy to manipulate with the times. You have no idea how much of this post I've grappled with in my own work.
Good to see you getting caught back up.
Wonderful, thoughtful writing! (I suspect Lincoln would be first tenor and Roosevelt second tenor.)
Yes, memories are fleeting (that's why it's important to experience each moment as it comes) and histories, both personal and national, get rewritten according to those imperfect memories and our world views (that's why it's important to get the FACTS, and not just someone's interpretation of them.)
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