Thursday 30 October 2008

THE LOSS

The replicant gets to his knees in front of Harrison Ford and pronounces the famous lines. "All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain".
As previously told, my hard disk crashed last sunday. I had something backed up, but mainly not. Hundreds of pics, hours of climbing videos, movies, musical rarities like PJ Harvey and Bjork together live, and most of all, hundres of pages straight from the depht of my mind. Articles, reviews, my two final thesis in criminology and forensic medicine, my novel. I lost my novel, for the second time.
Why hadn't I saved everithing on a CD? Because I was going to buy an external hard disk as soon as I had some cash, obviously. Idiot.
Anyway, this kind of tragedy made me think about memory and time. Have I really lost something? And if so, what?
Probably, the first thing I lost is my ability to print things in my mind with burning types. Always trusty in our beloved technology, I could watch myself send the roof with just a couple of clicks, I could recall the exact words of an article in the same way. But do I still have the chance to recall the feelings, the memories, the pounding of my heart, as I was topping out, as I thought "This page is good"? I don't know.
Right now I am just terrified by the idea of putting myself again to rewrite my novel. I was very proud of what I had done, I was satisfied, and now I'm sure I can't get back to it with the same satisfaction.
The lesson is: use technology as a substitute. Use your brain as the main tool.

2 comments:

pascal said...

unless your hard drive actually caught fire there is a very good chance you can recover most, if not all, of the data. It will probably cost you some money but if you take it to a decent computer shop they should be able to do something. If you are willing to pay to recapture your brains notepad then it's worth it.

The main tool is always the brain.

Roberto Bagnoli said...

..mandala's teaching..