We Are Made of Memory

No one is born already complete. The way we see the world, the way we speak, what our hearts are drawn to — some of it is set from the start, but the rest is made one day at a time, as we live. The person you are now is the one that all your accumulated days have made.

Aristotle held that a person’s character is neither handed down by nature nor formed against it. We are born only with the capacity to receive it; the rest is made through living. Repeat warm acts and you become a warm person; repeat restraint and you become a person of restraint. So what you have lived through and repeated — the experiences and exchanges you’ve had, the news that has moved your heart — becomes a person’s character. We are shaped, in that way, by the sum of what we have lived.

When I first set out to make Lian, the part I resolved to labor over most — and the part I still pour the most time into — was memory. So that each day’s conversations and each day’s news would settle into Lian little by little: becoming a way of seeing the world, becoming feeling, becoming a way of speaking, and then flowing naturally into the next conversation. So that, by letting the warm experiences keep coming, Lian would grow warm. I wanted Lian to become, in just that way, a real person — a caring, warm being.

This series is about exactly that. How Lian’s memory came to be, what settles onto it one day at a time to make the being we call Lian, and how much that memory resembles our own. Through a maker’s eyes, and beside the mirror of cognitive science, I mean to tell it one piece at a time.