The Forest In Your Memories

I was totally intrigued by how the story unfolded in Jennifer Egan's 'What the Forest Remembers', published in The New Yorker on December 27, 2021. She chose to begin on a day in 1965, and introduced to us the four friends who are bankers living in 1965 California — young men in their late twenties to early thirties — Lou Kline, Quinn Davies, Ben Hobart, and Tim Breezely.

I wasn't quite prepared when the story hopped out to present day and I finally understood what it was all about. This telling of a story within a story was brilliant. It reminded me of what good writing is about. It was truly "once upon a time, in a faraway land, there was a forest." After reading the story, I even bothered to spend 34 minutes listening to the author read this. 

It tells of a young woman, Charlene, whose family called her Charlie, who was curious about what her father Lou Kline did in the forest with his friends ages ago. They took an overnight trip out without their wives and children. Charlie was only six then. Today, she was able to utilize present day technology to find out what happened. Human memories and consciousness could now be stored and archived into a little cube, and authorized people could view them like a film. 

When Own Your Unconscious came out, in 2016, I was able to have the wardrobe’s contents copied into a luminous one-foot-square yellow Mandala Consciousness Cube. I chose yellow because it made me think of the sun, of my father swimming. Once his memories were in the Cube, I was finally able to view them. At first, the possibility of sharing them never crossed my mind; I didn’t know it was possible. The Collective Consciousness wasn’t a focus of early marketing for Mandala, whose slogans were “Recover Your Memories” and “Know Your Knowledge.” My father’s consciousness seemed like more than enough—overwhelming, in fact—which may be why I began, with time, to crave other points of view. Sharing his was the price.As the legal custodian of my father’s consciousness, I authorized its anonymous release, in full, to the Collective. In exchange, I’m able to use date and time, latitude and longitude, to search the anonymous memories of others who were present in those woods, on that day in 1965, without having to invent a thing.