"Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract"
About this Quote
Memory, in Jessamyn West's hands, stops being a warm scrapbook and turns into a piece of physics: selective, biased, almost indifferent to our wishes. A magnet doesn't "remember" fairly. It attracts what it is made to attract and ignores the rest, and that metaphor quietly dethrones the popular fantasy that recollection is a moral act or a faithful recording. West's intent is corrective: memory is not a neutral archive but a designed instrument, tuned by temperament, trauma, desire, and the body's own survival logic.
The subtext is bracing. If memory "will pull to it and hold only" certain material, then nostalgia isn't proof; it's pattern. The mind keeps what fits its circuitry: the scene that confirms a grievance, the detail that justifies a choice, the moment that keeps love intact even after it curdles. West smuggles in a kind of determinism with the phrase "nature has designed it" - not society, not storytelling, not even willpower. That word "designed" implies an architecture older than our self-image, suggesting that what we call personal history is partly a biological sorting mechanism.
Contextually, West wrote across a century that forced Americans to argue with their own narratives: Depression, war, migration, domestic mythmaking. Her fiction often looks at families and communities where what gets remembered becomes a form of power. The magnet image explains how those private histories harden: not because people lie, but because attention itself has a built-in bias. The line lands because it feels unromantic and true: memory doesn't just store experience; it edits it down to what we are already primed to become.
The subtext is bracing. If memory "will pull to it and hold only" certain material, then nostalgia isn't proof; it's pattern. The mind keeps what fits its circuitry: the scene that confirms a grievance, the detail that justifies a choice, the moment that keeps love intact even after it curdles. West smuggles in a kind of determinism with the phrase "nature has designed it" - not society, not storytelling, not even willpower. That word "designed" implies an architecture older than our self-image, suggesting that what we call personal history is partly a biological sorting mechanism.
Contextually, West wrote across a century that forced Americans to argue with their own narratives: Depression, war, migration, domestic mythmaking. Her fiction often looks at families and communities where what gets remembered becomes a form of power. The magnet image explains how those private histories harden: not because people lie, but because attention itself has a built-in bias. The line lands because it feels unromantic and true: memory doesn't just store experience; it edits it down to what we are already primed to become.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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