I realized one day in English class, listening to different recordings of Chinua Achebe, that I live in an era where dead men can be kept alive, their faces, their voices…. Before he dies, a man can listen to his voice pristine and crisp in youth, maybe a child's laugh that was once his own…and in that same minute he can listen to his voice cracked and aged, withered like his skin and his memory, but never like my memory of him.

Memory is no longer in the mind, but is put to tapes, then cds, then to hard drives that if I'm being honest are completely alien to me, but I use them just the same. Buttons are easy to push, easy to understand. I don't need to comprehend the wires and circuitry and technological mumbo jumbo inside. I just need that button. I need that feed, that feed for my memory, to rewind and rewind and rewind that tape that is my mind from the second it began to form until it is one day bundled and twisted and warped and bunched up with age and life and knowledge like a vhs played too many times.

Things get scratched and worn. It's difficult to keep track of so much. But soon maybe, in the future, I'll be able to rewind and rewind so much that I can start from the beginning, all anew, fresh, smooth, empty so that it could play over again. Maybe the first time, I was distracted, missed out on some things, didn't catch every little hidden twist and turn and surprise…didn't get the meaning of life. Now I can again.

Except…If I can't remember, if everything is new, who is to know if it plays the same story as the first time? Who is to care? I live in an era where dead men can be kept alive, their faces, their voices, but if I can not remember who they are or why it is important to remember them…what happens to me? What happens to them? I forget. I'd like to tell the future what happens after that, but I can't. I don't remember yet.

Experiences make me who I am. Shape me, change me, form me. If I could have a second or third or fourth chance, a do over, another life…it would take away the uniqueness, the importance of trying and doing and experiencing and living. I would become nothing. There wouldn't be that same sense of necessity, desperation, that pushes me and everyone else to be the people they should be, want to be, have to be for themselves and the whole of everything. If I can just try again, restart every year, month, day, hour…there is no me, only shadows of shells of memories.

There is always history, but not always someone willing…or there to write it down to warn the next generation, to tell of their failures, their victories, to teach. I live in an era where dead men can be kept alive, but the meaning of life has been so changed that no one now lives as much as those who have died. That is, unless this they realize, I believe.