Forgotten People

I am equally fascinated & haunted by memories of the past. Browsing through family albums & studying photographs opens up a gateway into what seems a much more agreeable place than the present. I guess, this has to do with the fact that one remembers the wound but not the pain. Our human memory tends to create or retain mainly the good & positive parts of the past in order for us to stay sane. I am not entirely sure. Memories are wonderful things that consist of events that happened in the past & a dose of imagination that fill in the gaps. They help us remember where it all started & who we are. I am not so much interested in the scientific & anatomical side of the brain and the faculty of remembering but rather in the links & differences between the past and the present as well as the ripples of time. Looking at myself, I feel there is a deep social as well as an emotional connection with events, people and the zeitgeist of approximately the last hundred years and not so much with the time before. I feel I am connected up to the time of my grandparents when they were young families. Their concerns, their way of thinking, their cultural interests have somehow prevailed to a certain degree. I grew up reading the works by Erich Kästner, Hermann Hesse and Robert Walser, all authors of a time before I was even born. Their work was part of my grandparents' and my parents' time and has infiltrated & formed my own time and myself. more info: http://jayrechsteiner.com/forgotten-people.htm