Intense emotions help us to remember moments, which make up the most of our memories. Maybe there is a scientific explanation for that, but probably it’s my personal experience.1
I remember taking from my library a volume of Shakespeare’s tragedies when I was 12 or so. Before reading Macbeth, my inexperienced brain was assuming that the protagonist of every story must be a hero. And I was quite stunned when Macbeth turned out to be an ordinary human with flaws - with his indecisiveness, basic instincts for power, weakness in front of his passions. The story disturbed my soul back then, so I remembered it more accurately than, say, Hamlet.
Afterward, I developed a kind of masochism: I started to call a book well-written or a movie well-shot only if it disturbed me. That’s because their plotlines would get stuck in my mind for days to come and I would analyze them non-stop.
Soon I realized that it is not only about books and movies. I recalled the past events of my life, and the most memorable ones included negative emotions. For example, I remembered my losses more clearly than my wins in a critical round of a chess tournament. There was even a period when I was sure that my past was consisting of a chain of miserable events. I fixed this blindness of mine later on, after understanding the following.
Intense negative emotions help me to remember moments, I don’t put any effort into that. Good moments, however, require from me a conscious action: I have to notice that I am happy in order to remember it in the future. I must simply stop and pay attention. So, every once in a while when I am happy (and that happens more frequently now), I tell myself the words of Kurt Vonnegut’s uncle: “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is”. And I try to experience the moment without stupid distractions - without thinking about my desires, my future, or my past.
When I take a look back now, I notice my happy moments, too. I remember my grandfather telling me his stories, I remember bicycling down to the Lincoln Memorial in a cold and sunny morning, I remember the feast with my father.
I also remember my unhappy moments. But it is a part of life, and weirdly enough, I have developed a certain appreciation for that too. When I feel pain, I try to concentrate on it (I learned that from Trent Reznor and Johnny Cash). It somehow helps me to live more intensely.
Footnotes
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(Dec 2022) I am wrong because Irvin Yalom in his autobiography Becoming Myself writes: “…I must have experienced all these things, but I recall very little. Perhaps I was too preoccupied and anxious about transferring to the ninth grade in a new school and making new friends. Memory and emotions have a curvilinear relationship: too much or too little emotion often results in paucity of memory.” ↩