Andy :
Tell you where I’d go. Zihuatanejo.
Red:
Zihuatanejo?
Andy:
Mexico. Little place right on the
Pacific. You know what the Mexicans
say about the Pacific? They say it
has no memory. That’s where I’d
like to finish out my life, Red. A
warm place with no memory. Open a
little hotel right on the beach.
Buy some worthless old boat and fix
it up like new. Take my guests out
charter fishing.
A prologue is not needed to this epic scene in the movie ‘The Shawshank Redemption‘, like myself I am pretty sure that many of us have already had this scene imbibed in our heart. Years after watching this film multiple numbers of times, I have never thought about the depth of Andy’s ‘warm place with no memory‘ and its correlation to our own lives…
I don’t know why the Mexicans say about the pacific in this way but I am sure of one thing, if it is indeed true, then the pacific would have been over-crowded by now. Sometimes the hardest thing to live with is memories. Whether good or bad, once it becomes a thing in the past and far beyond the grasp of our horizon, it turns out to be a burden and we name them ‘memories‘. They are indeed one of those unbiased culprits whose ultimate aim remains the same irrespective of the path it has followed. When at the same time we sympathise over some of our unfortunate fellow human beings who have lost the ability to remember or recall (yea I deliberately used the word sympathise, its a fact that we just sympathise, a sort of relief that it didn’t happen to me, nothing more…) we also wish to forget some moments in our life…we always stumble upon this irony, don’t we? What we want is selective memory loss isn’t it? Just another subtle trait of selfishness…
But what causes these memories to become a burden? For good ones, it is a simple realization that they won’t come back…no matter what. Just like what Heraclitus quoted, “No man ever steps in the same river twice”, you can never step into the same memory twice. No matter what. Maybe we can recreate everything that painted a beautiful picture in our mind, but it shall never be the same again. Maybe the colours remain, but the emotions vary. Maybe for most of us, childhood remains the happiest memory of all. At some point of time, we all might have thought, “Wow, I will have a great time once I grow up” and now when looking back we understand that that was just a pipe dream.
Have you just thought why thinking or experiencing certain elements from the past bring repeated happiness? It can be some songs, movies, video games (for 90s kids), some outdoor games, stories, magazines or anything else. It might not be due to their aesthetic substance alone, its because we tend to link good memories with them. There can be senseless movies which you might still watch repeatedly just because it was something you watched and enjoyed during childhood. It can also be outdated styles of songs which you still enjoy hearing even though music styles have changed a lot. That is the power of nostalgia!
Then there is the other side of the story, things we wish to forget. There also, we link those memories with other elements, it can be a song, it can be a movie, sometimes, it can also be rain! Every time we happen to hear that song, see that movie, or experience rain, inevitably those memories come to your mind, just like an unwanted intruder. There is no way you can escape from it, maybe new experiences will weaken its intensity, but it is still there. Those are the times when we keep thinking of ‘a warm place with no memory‘…
But thinking about it for a second time, I feel that memories serve us some purpose. Maybe they are living pieces of evidence that prove we experienced life. It might be painful, it may bring us joy, but definitely, memories are takeaways that we get after experiencing love, friendship, separation, passion, pain and everything else that I cannot describe using words.
Maybe, Andy’s destination is nothing less than a place filled with voids, which serves no purpose at all but attracts millions of visitors like you and me…
livefiction 