"One of the simplest ways to always have ready access to memory is to keep a journal. Listening to music that you used to listen to is also very helpful. In the film High Fidelity, John Cusack's character, a record-store owner and vinylphile, does not organize his records alphabetically or by genre but 'autobiographically.' He organizes his records in the order he first listened to them. As he explains: 'If I wanna find the song "Landslide" by Fleetwood Mac, I have to remember that I bought it for someone in the fall of 1983 pile, but didn't give it to them for personal reasons.' For him, every act of listening to music is a chance to be flooded by the memories and feelings associated with a particular day or period of life.

"I could tell you that the point of exercising your memory is that it can help you with creativity (it can) and can give you ideas (it will) and allow you to find connections and meaning in things you otherwise would miss (it does), but that is not the point. The point is that memory allows one to appreciate the beauty of life in its entirety, its shape. Every human is the artist of his or her own life. Your life as you have lived it is your greatest work of art, and it is by memory that this art is perceived, is known, is appreciated. The point of memory exercise is to relish the whole tapestry of one's life.

"As I write these notes, I take a drink from a glass with ice in it, through the bottom of the glass I can see a light shining, and suddenly a memory wells up inside of me of being a small boy and swimming to the bottom of a swimming pool at night, seeing a light shining at the bottom of the pool, I am there. Every moment, everything I have ever experienced is still present within me, and always will be; it takes only a moment of allowing a light, a scent, a melody, a fragment or a cookie to summon the experience back. You can look at anything around you and think, What does this remind me of? Memory begins with a question.

"Memory is in us, but it is also in things, objects, images, and sights that open up for us. In this way everything we see is filled with life, is filled with potential memories of the life we have already lived, and in this way one can, and should, experience life not just as a day-to-day affair, not just as a present moment, but as an ever piling up accumulation of meaning, of emotion, of life. Memory gives life meaning."