Do you remember where you were when nothing happened? Nothing. Not when something happened. Not something like where you were, or what you were doing when you heard the news that JFK had been shot, or indeed John Lennon. Or the Challenger disaster or 9/11. Not those something. Nothings.
Where were you when you stared into space or walked down the street and precisely nothing happened. And this was nothing so memorable that it stayed with you all these years.
PS. This was inspired by reading an magazine article about the murder of John Lennon almost 25 years ago, and how I was able to still vividly recall the moment I learned about it from my grandmother early one December morning in 1980. "John Lennon is dead", she said.
Just then I thought that there should be a wiki or public-blog somewhere that would allow people to post up their memories of learning about any notorious event. Such that we could collect so many memories of a certain day, so many tiny fragments of millions of life stories and perspectives, that you could build up a clear memory snapshot of a certain point in time. And given that such event memories are usually pin-sharp, even many years later, the resolution and detail that could be rendered would be freakishly high compared with random, disconnected memories of non-events.
Then I decided that unconnected, non-event memories would be worth having too.
Where were you when you stared into space or walked down the street and precisely nothing happened. And this was nothing so memorable that it stayed with you all these years.
PS. This was inspired by reading an magazine article about the murder of John Lennon almost 25 years ago, and how I was able to still vividly recall the moment I learned about it from my grandmother early one December morning in 1980. "John Lennon is dead", she said.
Just then I thought that there should be a wiki or public-blog somewhere that would allow people to post up their memories of learning about any notorious event. Such that we could collect so many memories of a certain day, so many tiny fragments of millions of life stories and perspectives, that you could build up a clear memory snapshot of a certain point in time. And given that such event memories are usually pin-sharp, even many years later, the resolution and detail that could be rendered would be freakishly high compared with random, disconnected memories of non-events.
Then I decided that unconnected, non-event memories would be worth having too.