On Remembering - A Point in Time in Which all Perspectives Collapsed Into Reality and Became History - 1990
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: A single year lifted to the light and let fall. Taking 1990 as its subject, the essay works through six of its events — the Cold War's ending and the first web page served at CERN in the same twelve months; Mandela walking free from a prison many people distinctly remember him dying in; a telescope launched with a mirror ground precisely to the wrong shape; a teacher weeping in a church while a war began; two Germanies becoming one; and a prime minister deposed whom every observer recalls differently and, the essay argues, correctly. Its claim is that memory is not a record but an act: we do not keep the days we were told to keep, only the ones that resonated, and remembering chooses a shape from among many and lets us stand on it. Which makes remembering, in the end, a responsibility rather than an archive.
Author: Johnson, Jamison
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7165175437
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