It's a funny old thing. In some ways, isn't much of who and what we are "just" memory? The things we learn, the things that shape us. Not just what we actively remember, but also what's hidden, lurking beneath, steering us without us even realising.
Apparently the human brain's memory capacity is around 1 million gigabytes. It doesn't sound that much, does it? That would cost you about £60,000 if you bought extra storage drives from Amazon. Cheap at the price. What could you store on 1000 plug-in hard drives? Two hundred million songs. Or two hundred million photos. Or a million films. When you put it like that, it does sound like a lot. Does the sum total of all our memories add up to a million films worth? Adding in all the depth and complexity and subtlety and smells and tastes and breath and darkness, of course. I don't like to think so. But maybe it does. Computer memory even seems to work in a similar way: data are encoded, stored, then available for retrieval. And if the hardware or the software becomes obsolete, then recovering information from storage gets tricky...
Life recreated as film. Memory. What in your life would you like to remember forever? There's a lovely Japanese film from the 90s which touches on all these, After Life. I've got it on video somewhere but to see it again I'm going to have to go buy it again on DVD (cause it's not on iTunes). Now that doesn't happen with memories.
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