Time Machines
By Maria Reylan M. Garcia
The aging population has gotten more anxious and compulsively concerned of the current medical statistics regarding the prevalence of Alzheimer's disease during man's degenerative stage, when the once porcelain tight skin reveals a heave of layered wrinkles. According to Dr. Richard Bixby of Dallas's Doctor's Hospital, it is estimated that about 5 percent of adults over age 65 will have it (Alzheimer's), and as many as 40 percent of adults over age 80. Alzheimer's disease involves the malfunction of the nerve cells that causes changes in certain parts of the brain leading to a decline in mental function that would affect thinking, language, behavior and worst, memory. Yes, even I am alarmed of the reality that someday when all of my thirty-two ivory teeth are changed into artificial white dentures I may forget the very memories I hold dearly.
Man was bestowed by nature the gift of memory, the gift of reminiscing the past moments that he might have treasured or despised, and it seems man continues to enjoy such privilege. I guess this would be the very reason why we are still uncomfortable to the truth that someday we'll grow old and we will alas forget. The past may be an invisible entity brought to some momentary perception by shiny photographs and a minute's length of videos, but the provoking power it has to lure man into either regrets or hopes encompasses the concrete site of the present. The past, for me, is a vacuum of similarly cherished and damned memories that has one way or another built the persons we are now.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana vouched these words with great conviction that it had been the very first sentence on the very first page of my high school history book. I've always thought that he meant, if I could not remember all those historical facts, how Genghis Khan rode the mountains of Mongolia, I'll have to repeat taking my exams in history over and over again. But now that I've learned to comprehend what my friend George is really trying to say, it simply shows that the past bears such a weighty impact on the current present and the futuristic tomorrow. We ought to remember the past; we ought to learn from the past, we ought to live with the past. The first time you fall down, bruise or cut yourself the bleeding will be painful because you never anticipated the situation. The second, third and fourth time you tumble and earn a thick rough scab, the healing will be more tolerable because you have felt the pain once and it had made you stronger and more secure.
Time Machines have been one of the science fictions that have boggled the minds of many advocates of physics, the possibility seemed thin but who could question man's ability nothing seems impossible nowadays. I am not sure if everyone would agree, but if I would be given the opportunity to step inside a time machine and transport myself to a specific era of my life, I would certainly pick the past. Time Machines are usually dreamed of many in order to correct their mistakes in the past rather than see the outcomes of their precedent foolishness in the future. I want to go back in time more than I want to explore the future. Tomorrow could be a different thing if the past would be modified, replaced, changed. But the past will always be the past even if how much we flood ourselves with regrets and intoxicate ourselves with lamentations in the present time and tomorrow's future.
I was flipping through the pages of my high school yearbook and I couldn't help but smile at what has been even if the episodes that flashed in my mind may seem to be more bitter and resentful than a dreamland of sunshine and spring daisies. Yet, I am still confided and at ease with the fact that I could still remember, even if everything I could recall defies all the laughter I have right now. It doesn't matter if I would recall the dim memories of childish competition and cold quarrels with friends all it matters is that I have recalled, I still have that memory. The memory that helped shaped the dome to which I stand at the moment.
I am not sure if I will be among the 5% by the age of 65 or among the 40% by the age of 80 who'll be unlucky enough to gradually forget the keepsakes of the past. I am not sure if I will die with a blank and absent memory, I hope I will not. But, one thing remains sure, as long as I could still remember, as long as I could still reminisce, I won't stop doing so.
My friend George says…
When we remember, we learn.
0 comments:
Post a Comment