"I remember it clearly"

You'd say the fade might be true of other people, but your memories of the good years are sharp. You remember what you felt. You remember being happy.

Linda Levine, in 1997, studied people who'd supported a presidential candidate who suddenly withdrew from a race. She asked them, at the time, how they felt about it. Months later, after the election, she asked them to recall how they'd felt at the time. The recollections had shifted, and they'd shifted in a particular direction. People remembered their past feelings as more in line with how they saw the candidate now. Supporters who'd stayed loyal remembered feeling less angry than they'd said at the time. Those who'd fallen away remembered feeling more so. The feelings hadn't been stored and retrieved. They'd been partly rebuilt from the present.

This is a single study of one event, and the notes say so. But the finding sits with a great deal of other research on memory, which is that remembering isn't playing a recording. It's reconstructing, and the reconstruction uses what you know and feel now as material. So "I remember being happy in nineteen ninety-six" is partly a report and partly a construction, and the construction is being done by a person who believes nineteen ninety-six was the good old days, and who is therefore building a happy memory to match.

You can feel the seam sometimes. A diary from the year, if you kept one, is startling to read, because the person writing it is worried about things you'd forgotten, and doesn't seem to know they're living in the good old days. Old letters do the same. So does a friend who was there and remembers it differently, and says "you hated that job", and you did, and you'd taken the hatred out.

I'm not saying you weren't happy. I'm saying that the sharpness of the memory isn't evidence of its accuracy, and that a memory of a feeling is the least reliable kind, and that the clearest, warmest memories are the ones most likely to have been rebuilt to fit the story. The chapter 1 exercise is a small correction. The diary, if you have one, is a bigger one. Chapter 20 is about going and getting the whole record from wherever it still exists.