What is left once you have left the stage is an idiosyncratic image, especially the one presented in later years….One’s remaining image, that unique way of being and doing, left in the minds of others, continues to act upon them—in anecdote, reminiscence, dream; as exemplar, mentoring voice, ancestor—a potent force working in those with lives to live.’ —JAMES HILLMAN

But we are usually not aware that when we look back in time, our penchant for pattern-making leads us to be selective about which memories have meaning. And we do not always make the right selections. We build our story - our model of the past - as best we can. We may seek out other people’s memories and examine our own limited records to come up with a better model. Even then, it is still only a model - not reality.

“This is a key idea: “memories” from childhood are not vestiges from the actual past but images coloring the present. They are not history but filters for seeing certain aspects of what is going on now.

The child is a living image, in and of the present, not only a historical fact. I emphasize the imaginal child because ordinarily we assume that talk about childhood is personal history.

The more time that passes, the more details we forget, and research shows that the act of recalling an event can actually change our memory of it. In short, as a tool for studying past events, the human memory is at its best imprecise, and at its worst, inventive.