I lost one of my favorite earrings the other night. (Like socks, you always lose one of a pair of earrings, never the whole pair.) The pair wasn’t anything special, at least to look at: medium-sized, teardrop-shaped, made of wood, stained dark blue. I’ve lost things before, of course, and I tend to get over it fairly quickly. Losing one of these earrings, however, was, well, heartbreaking is certainly too strong a word, but it was quite sad.
I wasn’t sad because I wore them all the time: I didn’t. I was sad because in losing one of the pair of blue earrings I also lost a bit of what they represented to me, some happy memories. A few years ago, I spent a summer backpacking through Europe with a friend but also travelled by myself for a few weeks. The time I spent travelling alone was traumatizing for my parents (as a matter of fact, I think they’ve repressed the whole affair, so hopefully they won’t read this column), but it was some of the most fun I’ve ever had. I bought the earrings for myself on my last day in Paris, which also happened to be my 20th birthday. I had been wandering around the Latin Quarter and found them at a small boutique: When I wore the earrings here, I always thought of my trip to Europe and particularly of Paris.
After I lost the blue earring, I was upset about it for a little while, but then I felt silly and started berating myself: After all, it’s not as if losing that earring took anything away from my experience, I said, or meant I was going to lose those memories. The more I thought about this, though, the less certain I was that it was true.
My memory is not what it used to be: These days I have a hard time remembering what I did the previous week, much less a few years ago. Hopefully the rest of y’all are in better shape than I am, but I’m not sure it’s possible for anyone to remember his or her life in vivid detail. We lose things along the way. In order to be able to function, we choose, unconsciously, some things to remember and some to forget, and for me, the group of things forgotten far outweighs the things remembered. To compensate for this loss, I find myself holding onto random items — a book of poetry, an empty bottle of sake, a picture of my friends, a pair of blue earrings — that for me come to symbolize whole events and relationships, serving as linchpins in my erratic life, telling me who I am by reminding me of who I have been.
We do this as a society too. In Europe I spent the majority of my time wandering around monuments, gardens, art galleries and cathedrals. I adore walking through museums and castles, but six weeks spent amongst paintings and statues finally caused even me to stop and question the point of it all. Why study the past, visit the tombs of dead men and women or build monuments to them?
Well I’ve personally found that sharing fun facts about Roman architecture makes me popular at parties (or not), but the better reason for visiting these places was carved above the entrance to the Scottish National War Memorial inside Edinburgh Castle and was strikingly straightforward: “Lest We Forget.”
The experiences of people who lived years before our time have shaped our lives, though we don’t often think about that, just as all those forgotten parties and conversations have shaped my life. Museums and monuments serve for society the same purpose my blue earrings served me: to paraphrase historian Leszek Kolakowski, they remind us who we are. I don’t think that’s the most important thing we can discover, but it’s in the top five. Too bad for me I lost that earring, huh?
— Leigh Dickey is a junior in global studies. She can be reached at [email protected].
