There’s a new 4K print of Pulp Fiction showing in the theaters. It’s one of my favorite films and has been ever since I first saw it in the theater in 1994. I was still in high school, had just gotten my first car and was on a date with a girl, one of “the great ones” that Chazz Palminteri talks about in A Bronx Tale, one of those you think about sometimes who got away, who you wish you could have somehow held onto a little longer, who a part of you still misses and always will.

I loved the film right away and I’ve since seen it dozens of times over the years. I had it on VHS, then on DVD, then as a file on my hard drive—legally acquired of course. I’ve seen it on television with the f and n words edited out. But I haven’t seen it on the big screen since that night. So when I saw the listing, my first thought was “Oh man I’m going, that’s all there is to it, I’m fuckin’ going.” But as the day went on I started to have second thoughts.

If I went to go see this film that I’ve already seen a million times, what would I want to get out of it? Partly I want to see who else shows up—is it all aging GenXers like me or do younger people like this movie too? The 90s are experiencing their inevitable recurrence right now, so maybe Gen Z is about to discover early Tarantino the way they’ve discovered baggy pants. Partly I want to see the film on the big screen again, the way it was meant to be seen. I want to see Jules recite Ezekiel 25 and hear “Misirlou” and “Girl You’ll Be A Woman Soon” on big surround sound speakers. But more than anything, I think I want to somehow relive or recapture some of those earlier times, by seeing this film which defined “cool” for me as much as anything else in my twenties, and which is linked in my mind with a very good memory.

Nostalgia is a natural and probably universal feeling. We all miss the good parts of our past, and every old man pines away for his youth. But I wonder if we who are alive today experience nostalgia in a different way than those who came before us. Imagine a man three hundred years ago. He is in his forties and he is reminiscing about his youth. There are no photographs or videos of anyone or anything. At most, he might have a painting or drawing of someone or something. He may have a diary he has kept, or some letters from other people, maybe from the girl he loved as a boy. Whatever music he liked in his youth, the only way he can hear it now is for someone else to play it live, which will inevitably be different than the way he heard it then. He has only his memory: whatever nature and experience has burned into his heart and made him unable to forget.

Contrast this man to a man today—to myself. Any song I liked during any part of my life is on my phone or on the internet, accessible in an instant. It sounds exactly the same today as it did then since it’s the exact same recording; the only difference is the speakers (and I am not nostalgic for my 1985 Oldsmobile factory speakers, not in the least). I can listen to it and I can even watch the video if I want, since I’m of the generation for whom MTV was king. The television shows I grew up with are almost all on DVD or online, and I can even find some of the commercials from that time on YouTube. (How long before they start offering subscriptions to full recreations of television stations from particular years? When can I subscribe to “NBC 1981” and watch Hill Street Blues and Johnny Carson with news about Ronald Reagan by Tom Brokaw and commercials for ShowBiz Pizza and “The best part of wakin’ up is Folgers in your cup”?)

That girl, the one who got away, I have a few old photos of her. I may or may not have looked her up on Google to see what she’s up to these days. She’s probably married with kids like me. If I was a bit younger—or a boomer—I would look her up on Facebook, but I’m of a particular niche generation that mostly abstains from social media except to get news and shitpoast. If I was younger still, I would probably have an archive of text messages and a lot of photos and videos of her because I would have been carrying around a mini-computer with a built in camera and microphone for most of my life.

Somewhere there is an NSA data center that is keeping all the recordings of all of our phones and devices forever, and someday future historians will have access to it and they will be able to write your biography by going back to listen to and watch every moment of your life as recorded from multiple angles by the various recording and surveillance devices you are surrounded by every day. This will reach absurd proportions, where in order to really understand a life you will have to spend the entirety of yours listening to and watching theirs in real time, but then you will die before you have time to write anything about it, unless we achieve significant human life extension. (Is there a Borges story about this?)

What will nostalgia mean in a world where everything is on record and accessible for instant recall? I think it already means something different today than what it meant for the man three hundred years ago and all the rest of humanity who lived before the advent of recording technologies. I don’t think people then had the option to escape into the past in the same way that we have today. I’ve noticed that a significant number of my generation of 80s kids are inordinately nostalgic for our childhood. I understand it, and I indulge in it myself from time to time, but I know people who have taken it to a whole other level, obsessively collecting the toys they played with as a boy as well as other 80s and 90s memorabilia and hanging them on the walls of their home offices, as though recreating their childhood bedrooms.

It’s a way to escape the absurdities and disappointments of modern “adult life,” and also to hang on to the past, or try to. All such attempts are ultimately doomed to fail, of course, and I wonder if there is even any benefit to making the attempt. I am torn between thinking that our most cherished memories give our lives depth and profundity, and thinking that they are the heaviest shackles which bind us to an illusion: the illusion of the past. Probably they are both. But insofar as they are the latter—insofar as the past is a desert mirage which, no matter how enticing it may appear, will never slake our thirst for it—all the technology of recording only serves to bind us more tightly to it, to hinder our ability to let it go and to forget.

Of course, there are things we want to remember, not forget. If I could erase my memory of the girl who got away, I wouldn’t. I could throw away those old photos, but I don’t, because even though she broke my heart when she broke up with me all those years ago, my memories of her are sweet, not bitter. The bad times are faded and the good times are vividly retouched, because that’s what memory does. The eternal sunshine of the spotless mind is just a blank canvas, which is only interesting if you’re into modern abstract art, which I’m not. But then a completely filled canvas on which nothing has ever been erased and redone is not a better alternative.

Nietzsche praised what he called “active forgetting” as the ability to properly digest the past: to absorb what is useful and nutritious, excrete what is not, and then be done with it, like a good meal. He contrasted this to the man of ressentiment, a kind of psychic dyspepsia and constipation in which remnants of past experience keep reasserting themselves like rancid gas in the digestive tract. Imagine not being able to forget anything—that is the world we are moving towards. Imagine your wife or girlfriend saying, “Alexa, play that argument we had last year” any time she wants to remind you that you were the one who lost your temper first and snapped at her.

Memory is always selective and hierarchical, and the technocracy’s megamemory will be no different. It will preserve the recording of your daughter’s third birthday party and you’ll have it forever—that’s the carrot—and it will preserve that time you drunkenly ranted about the immigrants in your neighborhood and said some words that are verboten—that’s the stick. Will it record that Britain was a historically white nation of Angles and Saxons, or will it preserve a revised 21st century “history” with African kings and queens on the royal throne in antiquity? Someone will have to decide. Someone always decides.

Memories are mercurial. One of the things we know now, because of brain studies, psychology and recording technologies, is how much our memories change over time and how unfaithful to reality they can be. Nietzsche spoke of active forgetting, but there is also passive forgetting, which happens entirely in the unconscious. At the end of the day, you have no absolute proof that your memories are real, that things happened the way you think they happened just because you remember them that way. You can’t even be sure that you remember things the same way today that you remembered them ten years ago. If your memories had changed, how would you know? We are all like Deckard and Rachel in Blade Runner and we always have been, we just weren’t aware of it before.

This mutability of memory is the premise of some New Age systems of reality creation. It’s a tempting leap to make: if we can’t be sure that our memories are true, why not just make them up the way we want them to be? (Cue reference to Total Recall—Philip K. Dick anticipated everything.) The short answer is: because even though we can’t know that our memories are true, we can know that they are false if we remember making them up. So most of these systems try to get around this by attempting to forget the implantation of the memory, something that chaos magician Peter Carroll calls “sleight of mind,” analogous to the stage magician’s sleight of hand. One of Carroll’s methods of forgetting, derived from Austin Osman Spare, involves working yourself into a sexual frenzy by gooning and visualizing your desire in sigilized form, then willfully forgetting all about it after you’ve spent yourself. It would seem to be based on the hypothesis that you can blank your own slate if you just coom hard enough.

I don’t think the conscious mind can take control of the unconscious, whether by gooning or any other method. Nietzsche said that in our age, with our newly acquired knowledge of psychology and biology, consciousness is being forced to learn modesty. Waking consciousness is not the “secret king” of the body (if I may adapt Vox Day’s concept of the gamma male with delusions of grandeur). It’s more like the way Rust Cohle describes it in True Detective: an appendage which may well be an evolutionary mistake.

The process of sifting through experience and prioritizing some things over others is happening all the time—in the unconscious. The conscious mind has little control over it, and I imagine that the unconscious looks upon its pitiful little efforts with amusement. “Aw look, it’s trying to walk.” Nonetheless, despite our limitations, we have little choice but to take hold of the reins and try to steer our course through the chaos of time as best we can.

I’ve never been to any of my high-school reunions, because I don’t live in my old hometown anymore, but also because I think it would be disturbing to see the people you grew up with after twenty or thirty years, to see how time has changed them. That girl who got away—I don’t want to see her now. I have a photograph of her looking radiant back then, and in my mind that is who she is and who she always will be to me. I don’t want to see my old high-school classmates either, for the same reason—except of course the people I didn’t like, in which case I enjoy imagining how old and fat and decrepit they are now. It’s hard enough to see the people I do keep in touch with, because age has taken its toll as it inevitably does, and I prefer to remember them in their prime, at their archetypal best.

So as the surveillance state metastasizes in all its Alexa-AdSense banality, I exercise my active forgetting in the few ways left to me to do so. I don’t go to high school reunions. I don’t look people up on Facebook. And I won’t be going to see Pulp Fiction in the theater again. As the great philosopher Johnny Thunders said, you can’t put your arm around a memory, so don’t try.