Chapter 2. Appendix: The records read

If the father who always took the family photographs is hardly in them, how will the place of the person who cannot be seen be remembered?

How does the absence of the person who made the record show itself in memory?

Hypothetical children looking through an old family album together.

Clues for calling to mind even the person who took part from outside the photographs.

The person seen most in the photographs was at the centre of the memories.

The mismatch between visibility in the record and actual participation.

The voice that got the laughs from behind the camera, and the father's tastes.

Seen only as the recorder's absence, the wish of a person who wanted to avoid the camera disappears.

Are not other people who were not photographed left out in the same way?

Memories from outside that come to mind while looking at the photographs can be added. Asking whom the role of keeping the family record made visible. Not taking the amount of material left as equal to the importance of a life. In observational records the behaviour of unobserved life remains too. There is a risk that only the lives of regions rich in footage will be recorded as more important. In the records we send, how visible is the being that chose the records?

My older brother and I remember the same moving day completely differently; which memory should be kept in the family's story?

Can memories of different experiences coexist within one shared record?

Hypothetical brothers talking while writing down the family history.

A way of recording that does not make liars of each other.

A shared story needs a single memory that agrees.

The difference between a common event and plural experiences.

The day of an older brother thrilled by the new house and of a younger sibling crying over a lost friend.

Saying that every difference should be acknowledged can cover over even conflicts of checkable fact.

Can the fact that the same event was different for each not be kept as it is?

Separating having my feelings acknowledged from erasing the other's memory. Within a family, the record should not be decided only by whoever speaks louder. Can a shared history also preserve the reasons for disagreement? Going through the same environment does not mean that the experience of every living thing can be called the same. The place a migration leaves and the place it reaches remember the same movement differently. Combining records from different points of observation does not make them one experience.

If the video recording the village festival leaves out the quarrels and keeps only the laughing scenes, will we in the future be able to understand that day properly?

What does editing a shared memory beautifully hide and keep?

A hypothetical resident producer editing the festival's record video.

A way of keeping both the joy of the celebration and what was left unresolved.

To make good memories, uncomfortable scenes must be left out.

The tension between the care of memory and the omission of fact.

The reconciliation worked out together after the fight, and the conversations that were not filmed.

Demanding a complete record can erase the difference between private life and the purpose of the record.

Is disclosing every quarrel necessary for those involved, too?

How does a person who appears in the video wish their own image to be kept? The purposes of a celebration video and of a record reflecting on how things were run can be told apart. Can a community's pride include uncomfortable memories? A record that films nature only as beautiful can also hide the costs of a relationship. A widely circulated image of a region does not stand in for the complexity on the ground. How will a future listener who receives only fragmentary records recognise what was left out?

Is there no way to preserve, rather than hand over to the scrap dealer, the broken crocks and flowerpots that neighbours have tended together for 30 years in a corner of the corridor of an old corridor-style apartment block facing demolition?

Faced with the physical dismantling of shared housing, how can the memory of small shared objects in which the years are condensed be passed on?

During the move-out period of an ageing apartment block in a hypothetical redevelopment district, the broken flowerpots and sauce crocks that have kept watch over the corridor are classified wholesale as waste and wait for the collection truck.

The wish not to lose the memory of hand-worn things that hold the traces, the joys and the sorrows of a life shared through thick and thin with neighbours for decades.

The recognition that things are not mere matter or rubbish but living stores of memory in which a community's history and time have settled in layers.

The problem of preserving a community's micro-history as it vanishes, powerless, before the economic efficiency of urban development.

The face of the neighbour who planted the first flower in that pot, the breeze of the early-summer evenings when water was shared, and the tiny metal sticker engraved on the bottom of the pot.

The risk of excessively sanctifying the material value of memory and so disregarding the harsh, practical urgency of demolition and relocation.

When it is time to leave for a new home, what practical help is there in clinging to broken, useless odds and ends?

When a space I lived in disappears, by what single object do I want to remember that time? Can a ritual of memory be held with the departing neighbours, each keeping one shard of a broken pot? How should urban archive policy record and preserve the small shared objects and the oral memories of residents in redevelopment areas? Where do the earthworms and soil microbes that have lived for generations, over decades, in the soil of the apartment's flowerpots scatter to after the redevelopment? When the memories of the cities that human civilisation has built are erased by climate disaster or war, what should be left as heritage for the future? In the far future, when matter has crumbled, what of our lives will archaeologists read from the plastic flowerpot shards of an abandoned apartment corridor?

Is the person sitting alone at the place of a time-capsule promise, made on finishing high school ten years ago, 'Let's meet at the snack shop in front of the school on this day ten years from now', a sentinel guarding a forgotten past?

In the torrent of time gone by, how does the act of not forgetting a callow promise from the past and keeping it alone redeem the continuity of memory and life?

The evening of a young person who came, on the date promised ten years ago, to a worn alley snack shop facing hypothetical redevelopment and, with no one coming, ordered tteokbokki alone.

A faithfulness of memory that wants to prove that the pledge of friendship exchanged innocently in youth was not a lie, even as the years pass and life grows hard.

The belief that remembering and keeping a promise is, beyond a duty to others, an existential struggle not to be cut off from one's own innocent past self.

The forgetting of others, swept away by the weathering of time, and the lonely and sacred weight of memory of the one who stands alone at the place of the promise.

One's own older face reflected in the snack shop's window, the faded graffiti on the walls, and the weary realities in which the friends who did not come must be living.

The risk of becoming so sunk in nostalgia for the past that it degenerates into a romantic refuge for avoiding the new relationships and tasks of life in the present.

Is it not an immature fixation to be bound by a scribble of a promise from thoughtless days, which everyone, busy making a living, has forgotten, and to sit moping alone?

Do I have an old promise I could not keep that I still hold in a corner of my heart after many years? Instead of blaming the friends who did not come, can there be a blessing, at that snack-shop table, that each of them is well in their own life? How should history and literature record the small-scale memories of those who kept to the place of a promise against the forgetting of the years? What of the memory and promise of the salmon that crosses thousands of kilometres of sea and, years later, without fail returns to the river where it was born to spawn? How are social promises to remember, and not forget, the tragic massacres and suffering of history to be kept from being forgotten amid changes of government and generation? In a future society where every individual's past is perfectly recorded as data and being forgotten has become impossible, what meaning will 'the human devotion of keeping memory' carry?

Why does a single smell of the dry wind sweeping through an alley at dusk in late autumn bring back, like lightning, the last conversation with the person parted from that autumn ten years ago?

How does the mechanism by which the smelled and felt air of a particular season and wind suddenly unseals a sealed memory preserve human emotional continuity?

At a bus stop on a hypothetical commute home, a middle-aged person breathes in the chill early-winter wind, feels a sudden lurch in the chest and is seized by a scene of old memory.

The wish to meet again, through the wind of the season, and make sure of the innocent feelings and the person of former days that were thought lost in the time of forgetting.

The fact that human memory is chemically encoded not in the numbers of the calendar but in the air of nature, such as the texture of the season's wind, the humidity and the smell of dry grass.

The vivid presence of a memory that revives, beyond rational control, at the season's trigger, and the resurrection of tender feeling.

The aching emotional upheaval to be gone through as the pain and regret of that time surge back, and the dullness of returning to everyday reality.

The risk of being so caught by memories of the past that the person now at my side and the joys of the new season cannot be fully enjoyed.

Is it not a sentimental waste to give too much fateful meaning to a chance association that arose merely because cold wind stimulated the cranial nerves?

Do I carry a precious scene of memory that plays automatically in my heart whenever I smell the wind of a particular season? Is it possible to stay beside a friend steeped in the loneliness of the season, quietly listening to the story behind the friend's old memory and drinking warm tea together? How should literature and art preserve, in their own language, the fine traces that the change of seasons leaves on human memory and the soul? What of the seasonal memory of the jay, which recalls by the smell of autumn leaves and the feel of the terrain the place where it hid acorns years before, and goes to find it? In a smart civilisation where everything is remembered only through the notifications of digital photo albums and the sensory medium of the seasons has disappeared, how does inner human memory dry up? For a future humanity whose four seasons have been stuffed and mounted in climate-controlled domes, what incomprehensible code will 'the faint memory of first love carried on the autumn wind' become?

On the road to primary school, visited again after 30 years, what memory is the time that is restored when the hand feels along the rusted iron gate and the faded cracks of the wall passed every day back then?

When the familiar physical landmarks and signs of childhood have withstood the weathering of time and survived, what is the continuity of life and the reconciliation that a human being experiences?

An alley in a hypothetical declining old provincial town, where the protagonist, now middle-aged, comes face to face after 30 years with the worn stationery-shop sign on the road to school where the protagonist ran and played as a child, and stops.

The longing, amid a changed world and my own ageing, to confirm that the innocent starting point of my childhood still stands firm as matter, and to recover the roots of life.

The recognition that the scratches on things and places are not mere wear but a physical anchor (Anchor) of memory that binds a person's whole life and the time of childhood firmly to the present.

The emotional continuity of childhood, restored as if by a miracle through the constancy of place, and the deep consolation of time.

The absence of the friends who ran along hand in hand back then, and the decline of an alley now worn and in danger of being torn down soon.

The risk of clinging only to preserving the physical traces of the past and so suppressing the demands for better, more comfortable housing of the residents who must live their present there.

Is growing sentimental over an old, decrepit, useless wall and a rusted gate not a fruitless retrospectivism that blocks the modern development of the city?

Do I remember an alley sign of my own, or a single old tree, on which precious memories of my childhood are carved? On finding the old road of home again, can there be gratitude for the quiet time of the townspeople who kept the old buildings rather than tearing them down? Should historical and cultural policy designate as everyday heritage not only the sites of great figures but also the signs of old alleys that hold ordinary people's small memories of walking? What of the place memory of the old elephant that recalls a rock pool deep in the forest where it drank during a drought decades ago and leads its young there? How is the violence of a vulgar-capitalist urbanisation, which tears up every city on a ten-year cycle and wipes out its citizens' childhood memories entirely, to be stopped? What will be the nostalgia of future children who, after Earth's old cities have been drowned by climate catastrophe, walk their ancestors' old roads to school inside the simulators of a space base?

What is the sense of time that wakes when a finger runs down my nickname in the cheeky round-robin messages that friends scrawled crookedly in the margins of a graduation album 30 years ago?

Is the act of tracing the names and handwriting of a vanished time a magic that revives the stuffed and mounted record of the past as living emotional memory?

Hypothetical situation: before a move, a middle-aged person takes a dusty high-school graduation album out of a corner of the wardrobe and, looking at the playful signatures and scribbles friends wrote, cannot turn the page for a long while.

The wish to face again, through the mirror of memory, the figure of the radiant and innocent time within me, forgotten under the press of a fierce everyday life, and to be comforted.

The belief that the voices, the body warmth and the classroom air of that time are sealed intact in the signatures and names friends wrote by hand on paper.

Held there is the vivid power of memory by which a single recorded name summons, in an instant, the forgotten story of youth and its web of relationships.

The irreversible sense of loss, that with contact already broken or lives already ended the relationships of that time can never be brought back, pierces the heart.

Assuming that the memories held in a graduation album are warm for everyone can overlook the real exclusion of those for whom school life was painful.

Might it not be a sentimentalism that, buried in past glories or memories, grows neglectful of present relationships and life?

Individual: What is the dizziness of the moment of reading a nickname in a friend's scrawled, bad handwriting, as if the noisy classroom bell were ringing in the ears again? Relationship: What would it be like to begin a reunion by finding an old friend's phone number written in the album, hesitating, then picking up the receiver and bravely asking how things are? Society: How can the cultural-heritage value of handwritten round-robin messages and analogue graduation albums, vanishing as the digital age arrives, be archived? Other lives: What of the survival archive of the grandmother elephant who, sniffing with her trunk, recalls the scent marks of the routes taken years ago to find watercourses and feeding grounds? Planet: What is the journey of archaeology that restores humanity's collective memory by deciphering the names of kings and the titles of gods that past civilisations carved in rock art and stone steles? Distant future: In a future where every memory of school days is recorded automatically as a three-dimensional hologram, will the tenderness of one line of scribble on yellowed paper be understood?

Why is it that every time the postcards bought at each travel destination are taken out and looked at, even the sunlight of that time comes back?

Does a small souvenir vividly call back a moment gone by?

Hypothetical situation: a scene is imagined in which, on a rainy-season afternoon, the bundle of postcards in a desk drawer is taken out and looked at one card at a time.

The questioner wonders why a single small piece of paper brings vivid sensations back to life.

The questioner feels that the air of that time has soaked into a souvenir chosen by hand.

The compression kept the original's memory, that even the sunlight comes back when the postcards are looked at, in the words that it vividly calls back a moment gone by.

From the compression, the process of collecting, buying at each destination, and the concrete situation of taking them out on a rainy-season afternoon dropped out.

In the compressed question the word souvenir is broad, so the particular charm of a postcard's pictures and handwriting can be hidden.

Might it be not because of the postcards but because of the laughter in front of the shop where they were chosen?

Seen as an individual, if the heart grows warm on looking at an old picture, where does that warmth come from? Seen as a society, if the habit of exchanging postcards links hearts, what kind of letter would it become? Seen as humankind, if the wish to keep the scenery of faraway places is old, what was it longing for? Seen from the standpoint of life, if paper and handwriting endure a long time, what kind of bond is that? Seen from the standpoint of the planet, if paper holding the light of a distant village comes home, what kind of 旅 would it be? Seen from the standpoint of the cosmos, if one card's memory of sunlight is set in wide time, how would it shine?

Smelling the faint scent of soap in Mum's sweater, taken out of an old drawer, should I spread it out on the quilt and feel my way back through the memories?

How should old memories that rise with a smell be tended and brought into the present?

Hypothetical situation: after the rainy season, a person tidying a drawer takes out Mum's old sweater. At the faint scent of soap an evening long ago comes back, and the sweater is spread out.

Wanting to tend, without hurrying, the memory that rose with the scent.

Underneath lies the thought that the scent in the clothes is the very heart of that time.

The longing to call up an old feeling through a faint scent remains.

Concrete touches such as the texture of the sweater or the damp of the drawer grow faint.

A memory of scent alone can hardly hold all of what came before and after past events, and the time that has changed.

If the longing lingers long, when should the story of the person now close by be heard?

When the sweater is stroked, how will the warmth that rises in my chest spread? When stories of that time are brought up with the family, how will our memories connect? If there were a village where old clothes are shared and worn, how would the grain of memory circulate? To the silverfish living in the cracks of the drawer, what season's home is old fibre? How has the road that runs from the soil of the cotton field to the sweater passed across the earth? If this scent disappears in days far off, in what light will the longing remain?