“Parker lies in darkness, recalling the thousand fragments of the hologram rose. A hologram has this quality: Recovered and illuminated, each fragment will reveal the whole image of the rose.
“Falling toward delta, he sees himself the rose, each of his scattered fragments revealing a whole he’ll never know – stolen credit cards – a burned out suburb – planetary conjunctions of a stranger – a tank burning on a highway – a flat packet of drugs – a switchblade honed on concrete, thin as pain.
“Thinking: We’re each other‘s fragments, and was it always this way? That instant of a European trip, deserted in the gray sea of wiped tape - is she closer now, or more real, for his having been there?”
– William Gibson, “Fragments of A Hologram Rose,” 19771
Regarding these scattered fragments, those instances in time, caught in that broken hologram rose …
"We do not remember days, we remember moments."
– Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), Italian poet, translator, and author
As any of us who’ve experienced unexpected, unbidden, and often quite vivid recall of certain moments of our lives, over and over again through the years, this seems unmistakable.
Yet in full context, Pavese went on to write: "The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten."
We’re left wondering: did he assert that richness lies also in those forgotten memories?
And if so, does this memory-submerged richness evade us entirely, due to our inability to access those memories? Have we lost it outright? Is it memory alone that creates and holds that richness?
Or do those millions of moments nonetheless profoundly inform and shape our present lives, even though we can’t consciously recall much of what’s occurred during our lifetimes? If so, what are the ways in which they exert such influence?
Or do they just flat-out matter, because we did those unremembered things, experienced those events, and influenced the world, in those times? Entirely outside of whatever influence they might have on us today? Do the ripples we contributed to the world still vibrate today, although they some of them may no longer be present in ourselves?
Or some combination of the above? Or even, perhaps, something else entirely?
As the Wikipedia entry for Gibson’s short story mentions, it was his “first published work, originally appearing in 1977 in Unearth 3, a short-lived science fiction collection magazine … Gibson was paid $27 for the story.”