In an old post, I wrote about remembering past thoughts. Specifically, it was about remembering and abiding by conclusions and decisions that you had previously reached through an involved process of reasoning. When it came time to enact the decision, you did not necessarily want to rehearse the entire chain of argument. Yet at the same time the decision would seem questionable without that logical support. The suggestion, drawn from Descartes, was that the process of reasoning could be short-circuited through feeling. When you previously finished reasoning to the conclusion, you enjoyed a powerful feeling of clarity and conviction at the end. When accessed, this feeling could conjure up your past conclusion or decision and stand in for the reasoning process.

There are other cases in which the object of recollection is not a thought but a brute fact, and often quite a mundane fact. For example, we frequently have to remember whether we did something at all. There is the paradigmatic, sometimes pathological, case in which someone is unsure whether they locked the door to their home and repeatedly feels compelled to go back to check. The simpler the task or errand, the more likely it is that we completed it automatically, without real attention, and the more likely it is that its completion would not really have registered in our minds.

When I try to remember things of this sort, what often comes to my mind is not an integrated recollection of the whole experience, but some small, discrete part of it. This mental image is all the more vivid for being so hyper-specific. One time at work, I was trying to remember whether I had documented an email that I had sent. After a split second, I was confident that I had because I saw concretely in my mind how I had recorded the identifying number of the email in the individual cell in the appropriate Excel spreadsheet. I could see myself pasting it in. Similarly, when trying to remember whether I had brushed my teeth one day, what came up was the clear visual of squeezing toothpaste onto the toothbrush. In neither case, did I remember anything more about the rest of the action.

Like that feeling of conviction, details function to condense and represent the memory of whole experiences. The case of travel is emblematic. When recollecting a trip, I often find myself coming back to the same few moments or scenes. They are somehow most salient and capture the vibe of the trip, even if it might be somewhat to me unclear why. When I think of my trip to Vancouver last year, I often recollect a lunch I had at an outdoor restaurant, after biking to the top of Prospect Point lookout, in the midst of natural scenery that seemed almost tropical. That somehow immediately encapsulates the trip, and I come back to other parts of it only inconsistently and more deliberately. Minutiae are in a way what subjectively defines things.