Memories that stay locked away do not fade. They quietly multiply and gain weight until some small thing wakes them and they blind us to the life in front of us. Writing them down is one way to keep them from crushing us.
Without memory we could not order even simple thoughts, and even a tender heart would lose the ability to show affection. Life would become a chain of meaningless moments with no trace of a past. Yet the same memory fills our lives with false ideas and illusions, so the thing that makes us whole also misleads us.
Destruction is not a later accident. It is already present in anything newly made. Our machines, like our bodies and our desires, burn slowly down to embers, and civilization itself is a glow that grows brighter by the hour with no telling when it will fade.
The more deeply we sink into our own work, the more we lose touch with reality. We build ever more complex mental structures and take that complexity for insight, while sensing all along that what really steers our lives lies beyond our grasp. Those who stay bent over intricate patterns long after the working day ends are haunted by the fear that they have picked up the wrong thread.