Quantum mnemonics

What is it?

Not to worry, this isn't an emerging discipline of study and isn't likely to rival Quantum Physics any time soon.

It's a way of thinking through writing about one's past, and has been recently articulated by writer/memoirist Andre Aciman.

Quantum mnemonics is about remembering the past as well as rearranging the facts in words because:

Words radiate something that is more luminous, more credible and more durable than real facts, because under their stewardship, it is not truth we’re after; what we want instead is something that was always there but that we weren’t seeing and are only now, with the genius of retrospection, finally seeing as it should have occurred and might as well have occurred and, better yet, is still likely to occur.

There is no past; there are just versions of the past. Proving one version true settles absolutely nothing, because proving another is equally possible. If I were to rewrite the scene one more time, this new version would overwrite the previous ones and, in time, become just another version among many.