I haven’t thought about that in years. My uncle was working there at the time; my aunt too, or maybe she was just visiting him. I vaguely remember them describing the experience. In any case, the “44th anniversary” part is what shocked me — I’ve been reminded that it happened nearly a half-century ago.

  Time flies like an arrow.
  Fruit flies like a banana.

I think I first saw that in a old Scientific American article about the difficulties in machine parsing of natural language. Lost in translation. A geek pun to me, since translation also refers to coordinate transformations: translation, rotation, scaling, skewing, … preserving topological equivalents across gross distortions, no tearing allowed. Ants. Moebius Strip II.

I sometimes envy those who have a sense of continuous, unbroken time. I imagine that for them events are like beads on a string, pages in a book, frames in a strip of film. Mention to them some event and they can provide context, cause and effect, sliding their finger along the curve and saying “see, this happened before, and this happened after”. The people who can always quickly answer those “where were you when such-and-such happened” questions that I hate. Steel Beach.

Like the “one, two, three, many” number concept attributed to some primitive tribes, time to me is only “today, yesterday, a while back, and a long time ago”. Time lies like pieces of a shattered mirror beneath my feet, glints and reflections, partial images fractured along random edges. Memory is a kaleidoscope filled with broken events, ever changing in random juxtaposition, tumbling in disconnected chaos. Mona Lisa Overdrive.

There are 10 key points mentioned in the summary, one of which is “People can remember events that they have not in reality experienced.”

For a poignant comment on the reverse situation, see “Momentary Clarity“.

We cross the street and I’m alone with EP for the first time. He doesn’t know who I am or what I’m doing at his side, although he seems to sense that I’m there for some good reason. He is trapped in the ultimate existential nightmare, blind to the reality in which he lives. The impulse strikes me to help him escape, at least for a second. I want to take him by the arm and shake him. “You have a rare and debilitating memory disorder,” I want to tell him. “The last 50 years have been lost to you. In less than a minute, you’re going to forget that this conversation ever even happened.” I imagine the sheer horror that would befall him, the momentary clarity, the gaping emptiness that would open up in front of him, and close just as quickly. And then the passing car or the singing bird that would snap him back into his oblivious bubble.

– Joshua Foer in Memory – National Geographic Magazine