Anatomy of a Memory

From Deborah Tall's A Family Of Strangers:

And who is to say that, in some crucial sense, the life that we remembered is not the life we lived?

After all: what's remembered is all we know. Everything that has meaning gets it from the up-till-now, the long file drawer of experience.

Knowledge relies as much on memory as on invention, on accumulation and axiomatic shape.

How otherwise could we cross the street?

How could we imagine a future without the given forms, the replications, the reincarnations of the already?