Recollection, with all the feelings that accompanied it
While reading The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler, I began to wonder about the difference between knowledge that feels like mine and knowledge that simply exists out there.
Nayler wrote the following when a character in the novel remembers a poem (emphasis mine):
A memorized part of Patricia Alameda's poem "Kalypso." Now come again to her, with all the feeling of heartbreak that had accompanied it.
I had already been thinking that the difference lies in the circumstances that surround the exact moment information is absorbed. The place, the weather, the time of the day, the sounds, the smells. And how how deeply time-bound we are as a species.
From that perspective, every piece of knowledge we acquire carries the sensations of the time through which we lived while acquiring it.
