Recently, we lost a dear family friend who lived to the remarkable age of 100 years and 9 months. She attended our wedding back in the late 1970s, and we remained in touch over the years.
During the last two decades especially, we visited her frequently in Paris. Now that she is gone, our memories of her live on, providing us with a source of comfort and contentment, and serving as a kind of shock absorber as we come to terms with her loss.
She lived in Bangladesh as a UN official, and had contributed to the women’s developmental issues in the mid-1970s. Bangladesh had a special place in her heart. She would always read my pieces -- even after she turned 100 -- and share her comments when we called her for long chats. I always found her feedback thoughtful and uplifting.
She would also advise me to read something she discovered. Decades ago, she introduced me to the works of philosopher Rene Girard (1923-2015) -- almost her namesake; ours was Renee Gerard (1926-2026).
Remembering her company, advice, chats in her book-filled living room in Paris, or having a meal at a Parisian restaurant gave me the idea of writing on memories. Suddenly, I remembered what our English teacher KPC (Kali Prashad Chaterjee) at Bagerhat High School taught us when elucidating William Wordsworth’s poem The Daffodils. KPC, summarizing the poem, told us that you find joy twice: First, by seeing the daffodils in the lake, and then again by remembering them.
This is what human memory does. It is not an archive we consult but a place we return to -- and we come back changed, often with a smile on our face.
Imagine life without memory. Each moment would arrive without a past and depart without a future to hold it. We could still eat, work, and move through the day, but nothing would add up.
A life lived only in the now is a series of disjointed events, not a story. It is memory that turns events into a biography, and a biography into an identity. We know who we are because we remember who we have been, and whom we have been with.
Nowhere is this clearer than in grief. When someone we love dies, what remains is not a file but a relationship that continues inside us. I remember my mother's laughter while reading Shibram Chakraborty, or Syed Mujtaba Ali. I remember a teacher's scolding, or a rare, hard-won praise.
These memories hurt, yet they also hold us. They remind us that we were loved, that we belonged somewhere, that someone's life was woven into ours.
Mourning is, in large part, the slow work of converting an absence into a memory we can live with. The dead do not leave us entirely so long as we remember them, and in remembering them we remember ourselves.
Memory also gives us a sense of direction. We recall the choices that led us here, the sacrifices others made, the values we were handed and the ones we chose. From these we draw purpose. A person who remembers a parent's quiet persistence may find the strength to persist. A person who remembers a friend's generosity may decide to be generous.
Human memory is also practical. We use it to solve problems, to recall what Marx said and where -- “peasants are like potatoes in a sack” in the Eighteenth Brumaire -- as students remain impressed. Memory helps us learn, plan, and function. In this respect, it resembles the memory of a computer, which also stores information and retrieves it when needed.
The comparison is tempting, and it is useful as far as it goes. Both kinds of memory help a system get things done.
But the parallel ends there. A computer's memory is functional through and through. It stores data in order to process it, and it retrieves data in order to complete a task. When a hard drive holds 10,000 photographs, none of them is more precious than another unless a program is told to rank them. Nothing in the machine aches when a file is deleted. Nothing is consoled when a file is restored. The memory serves the operation and has no stake in what it holds.
The newest AI systems, for all their astonishing fluency, do not change this. They can recall vast amounts of information, summarize a life, even write a convincing elegy. They can store and retrieve what we tell them about our parents.
Yet storing is not remembering.
There is, as far as we can tell, no one inside who is comforted by the retrieval, no one for whom the stored detail is a loss or a gift. These systems generate words about meaning without, so far as we know, experiencing meaning.
Their memory is a tool. Ours is a part of who we are.
There is a quiet lesson here about how we live: If memory is where meaning is made, then we have a responsibility to tend to it. We can ask our elders for their stories before it is too late. We can name the people who shaped us and tell their stories to the young. We can resist the thin, hurried present in which nothing is remembered because nothing is allowed to matter.
A culture that stops remembering together -- in rituals, anniversaries, and family tables -- will find that it has plenty of data and very little meaning.
At its core, computer memory is a vast digital filing system built on billions of microscopic electronic switches called transistors, but it has no emotion, least consciousness. Its functional power lies in speed and exact replication: It can store billions of these tiny data points, execute complex calculations, and retrieve files with absolute precision in nanoseconds without ever degrading, misremembering, or imbuing a single byte with emotion.
Computers will keep getting better at storing everything. What they cannot do, at least for now, is care about what they store.
That is our work, and also our gift. We remember -- not only to function, but to belong, to grieve, to love, and to go on.
Habibul Haque Khondker is a sociologist and columnist.