Note:
Agnoiology: Pronunciation (ag-noi-OL-uh-jee) The study of ignorance or the investigation of the unknowable.
Gloaming: That romantic time of day when the sun light has mostly faded but it’s not quite dark yet? You can call that the gloaming.
Reliquary: Pronunciation (re-lə-ˌkwer-ē) A container or shrine in which sacred relics are kept.
Silvered dark: A deliberately paradoxical phrase.
Silvering is the metallic backing that turns plain glass into a mirror; without it, there is only darkness. Yet the same silvering that grants the mirror its power to show also distorts and fragments whatever it reflects.
In Part 1, we explored how memory functions as a distorting mirror, bending and reshaping our past into something both familiar and strange. Now we turn to how this understanding shapes our present moment—our encounters with others and our ongoing search for meaning.
Similar contortion shadows our present encounters. With friends, strangers, or passersby, we glimpse only brief instants—a fleeting gesture, a fragment of laughter, a silence too weighty to name. Behind each feature, everyone carries a sadness that isn’t entirely their own. A burden that stretched generations as an invisible inheritance. Life becomes a search, sifting endlessly through wreckage, brushing away dust to find a clue. Sometimes, hope flares with every pebble of history we overturn, nudging us onwards in the belief that somehow the story will fit neatly together. Often our searching ends in ellipses, not conclusions. No entirety emerges—only shards, impressions, and barely audible echoes of what once breathed. Those of us fortunate to live an extended, healthy life eventually cradle a bowl—a Donburi or Kobachi cupped in palms—filled not with answers, but with tender remnants of those who were once dear to hearts.
An imperfect arrangement, a sleight of hand of remembrance means that meaning only resides in the significance of connection, homage to love, and shared experiences. No definitive, monumental truth in the memory stands firm. The distortion of the documentary itself is the truth—what endures is not accuracy, but the emotional resonance of all that we once held enduringly precious. Remembrance was never meant to be perfect; nothing is, for perfection is unattainable. Our analysis of profit and loss of memories is not in the accuracy, but in the constellation of tender gestures—each warm touch a guiding star, each voice an echo threading through the cells of time, each beloved presence an aura that turns an atmosphere sacred.
We recall the past not with surgical precision but with a trembling, a hesitant tiptoe. This softens the sharp edges of our past ugliness, stretches a bit the fleeting moments, and relief seems reachable in the absence of certainty. The darkness of oblivion is lined—almost secretly—with the reflective silver of memory. In that thin metallic film, absence and presence coexist. The gloaming is the vast, unremembered past; the silver is the mind’s fragile, gleaming attempt to catch and hold what has already slipped away. Each one is capable of restoring us, breath by breath, illuminating our becoming.