Perceptions are landscapes. Memories are works of art.

I was not feeling well. In a feverish delirium, and for no apparent reason, I began to recall a house I often visited in my childhood. I remembered that when I last visited this house, it seemed greatly in need of repairs. The family that lived there had fallen on hard times. It seemed that over the course of fifteen years of use, the house had worn down quite a bit. I was disappointed because I was remembering a place as it was and comparing it to an ideal vision deeply embedded in my memory. But what shook me the most was that the house seemed smaller than I had remembered it. How could that even be physically possible? Surely, the outer dimensions had not changed? Were there more people and objects inside making the dimensions seem different? Or had my own perception of it changed? Perhaps, both were true.

Memory is a hostile witness. I first saw the Grand Canyon on a cold morning when I was nine. It was a different Grand Canyon from the one I saw decades later, even though I could trace landmarks I had seen the first time. The basic assumption I make every is that the world changes interminably, but my memory is perfect. But where are the benchmarks to compare against? Proteins decay. Neurons find new connections. Memories are mutable. I change every day. How can I truly conclude that I’m even the same person after all these years?

And it is not just me. Stars exist as celestial bodies in three dimensions. We see stars in the sky in two dimensions in relation to other stars. We arbitrarily connect stars to form constellations. By finding patterns, we influence what others see in the sky as well. Meanwhile, the stars drift away. They burn out. The relation of memories to objectivity is similar.

Then again, what exactly is an objective world anyway? An objective experience cannot occur, since everything that happens must be subjectively compared to an earlier experience, either personal or learned, to make any sense of it. Every perception is filtered through senses and through the capacity for thinking. There are various wavelengths of light that correspond to what we call colors, but we cannot say objectively that colors exist beyond collective human thought. The other senses fair even worse. Henri Poincaré was singularly insightful when he said that objective reality was that which had been determined by the consensus of several thinking beings. In other words, there is no “reality” devoid of individual cognition and there is no “objectivity” apart from the rules which are agreed upon by our fellow humans. A frog in a well can know that the world is the well, but cannot know what lies outside of it. That is the sum of human experience.

But as sobering as this thought is, possessing a feeble intellect isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Even with an unreliable memory and limited capacity for thought, there is much to be learned. There are commonalities we can find with each other and with our planet. Every emotion is a gift. Perceptions are landscapes subject to shifts in weather. Memories are limited works of art. Endowed even with an idiosyncratic wellspring of consciousness, life is a beautiful thing.