Memories are made of pride - The art of culture

Memories are the most essential part of our own conscious history and can influence not only our feelings for and the way we look at our personal past, they can also have a huge impact on our present and future life.

They can fill us with happiness and pride or drown us in sorrow and shame, support, comfort or destroy us. They can appear and disappear at any given moment in our daily life triggered off by small incidents often barely noticed in the course of our hectic lifestyles and mostly quickly suppressed, if they are too disturbing.

But there are also very specific memories, which one may want to bring back as often as one can – memories of beautiful places one has seen, of ‘memorable’ events in one’s life, of wonderful people one has met, of fantasies of a better world, which one may have cherished when young and innocent.

And every so often a memory wells up out of the depth of our being and touches a cord in us and others, which it is hard to logically explain, but which nevertheless fills us with a deep and overwhelming pride in man’s achievements - even if they are not our own and do not even stem from our own cultures.