"Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart's desire"
About this Quote
Time and memory, in Dewey's hands, aren’t neutral measuring tools; they’re working creatives with an agenda. Calling them “true artists” is a sly reversal of the usual hierarchy where reality is solid and our recollections are the flimsy, unreliable copy. Dewey suggests the opposite: lived experience is raw material, and the mind’s ongoing reconstruction is where meaning gets made. That’s classic pragmatist instinct - truth isn’t a museum piece you discover intact, it’s something you shape in use, over time, under pressure.
The key verb is “remould.” It implies heat, softness, and handling. Memory doesn’t simply retrieve; it re-forms. The line flatters our inner editor while also indicting it: we don’t misremember by accident, we misremember with purpose. “Nearer to the heart’s desire” is the tell. Desire is doing the curating, sanding down edges, coloring motives, turning contingency into narrative. The “heart” here isn’t greeting-card sentiment; it’s the emotional engine that decides what counts as significant, what gets forgiven, what gets rebranded as fate.
Context matters: Dewey wrote in a moment when psychology and philosophy were prying apart the Victorian idea of a stable self. His broader project treats the self as an ongoing activity, not a fixed essence. This aphorism captures the comforting and dangerous payoff: we survive by reauthoring our past, but the same artistry can become self-deception - a private propaganda campaign that feels like wisdom because it’s beautifully edited.
The key verb is “remould.” It implies heat, softness, and handling. Memory doesn’t simply retrieve; it re-forms. The line flatters our inner editor while also indicting it: we don’t misremember by accident, we misremember with purpose. “Nearer to the heart’s desire” is the tell. Desire is doing the curating, sanding down edges, coloring motives, turning contingency into narrative. The “heart” here isn’t greeting-card sentiment; it’s the emotional engine that decides what counts as significant, what gets forgiven, what gets rebranded as fate.
Context matters: Dewey wrote in a moment when psychology and philosophy were prying apart the Victorian idea of a stable self. His broader project treats the self as an ongoing activity, not a fixed essence. This aphorism captures the comforting and dangerous payoff: we survive by reauthoring our past, but the same artistry can become self-deception - a private propaganda campaign that feels like wisdom because it’s beautifully edited.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nostalgia |
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