Quote from Jan Morris: “Every sentence we create we have
created from nothing, and made real, and every situation has been touched up in
our memory.”
Nothing comes from nothing. Every action or item is a
reaction to some antecedent. Every sentence we create, whether written or
uttered, is created in the immense, complicated structure of our brains. We want
to believe that we create spontaneously, but I just don’t buy it. We are products
of DNA, manifesting our genetic identity. That genetic trajectory is focused
and shaped by the deeply rooted culturing influences that have surrounded us
since we came into being. We are, if examined with enough scrutiny, entirely
predictable creatures, and once we have been set in motion, will continue to
stay in motion along a certain path.
Each idea we hold has a reason behind it, and each sentence
we create comes from an idea we hold. To say that every sentence comes from
nothing does a disservice to both language and human agency. We are creatures
filled with amazing things, and the sentences we build, the thoughts we express,
originate in the confluence of the meat and majesty of the human being.
As far as situations being “touched up,” I will agree with
that. No one knows their own past; they only know their own personal narrative.
We all view the events of our lives subjectively and with immense bias. If we
try to cross-reference an event with another person, discrepancies emerge,
because we are remembering things how we want to, and they are doing the same.
We have to accept that we can never remember past events objectively, because
we can never experience *present* events objectively. We are all telling
ourselves our own stories as they happen, and we are all unreliable narrators.
Thankfully, stories don’t need to be factually accurate to be true.
