#penseive

[lulublack90]

Prompt 19 - Memory

@jegulus-microfic September 19, Word count 121

Regulus stared at the shimmering liquid casting eerie reflections on the stone walls as he added another memory to the Pensieve. An image of James swam to the surface. He was smiling his most beautiful smile at Regulus. Regulus’s eyes prickled, and he pushed the tears back, swilling the image away with the tip of his wand. 

He added another and another and another. Image after image of James flashed across the surface. All his most precious memories were of James. He added them one by one so that they’d always be safe because what he was about to do, could put them both at risk. 

He donned his death eater robes and strode from the secret room beneath Grimmauld Place.

[viciousviolins]

Fallin’

[mysnarkyslytherinsecret]

What are your thoughts on when and why Snape got himself a pensieve?

A Pensieve is very expensive, but I do imagine that Dumbledore lets Severus use it during Harry’s Occulumency lessons to keep sensitive material from being possibly seen through the link that Harry and Voldemort have.  In the end, the Penseive in the Headmaster’s office is likely Dumbledore’s left to Severus in his will after his death.

[dear-ophelia]

It’s really weird to me that the Pensieve and bottled memories play such an important part in telling stories and remembering history in Harry Potter, and there seems to be no consideration of the unreliability of memory.

We are incredibly bad at remembering things accurately. Even a memory that is stored immediately after the event is inaccurate, due to biases in attention and various other quirks of the human mind. A memory recalled years later (like Slughorn’s memory of his conversation with Tom Riddle about Horcruxes, for example) would be vastly warped by time (even without him deliberately changing it. 

And don’t try to tell me that some part of the magic of extracting the memories preserves them in their pure, accurate form. The mind simply doesn’t store memories perfectly. The inaccuracy of human memory doesn’t boil down to a problem of recall, it’s an issue of encoding. The brain doesn’t need to store every bit of information about an event (and again, that information is all distorted by the particular biases of the observer) and it stores gists, some important pieces, maybe a sentence or a facial expression. And again, the quality of that memory erodes with time. 

[nosleepforthechaotic]

Feels

[sclubseniors]

Tru Story </3

[mari-abdul-blog]

Huh...

It is a staggering emotion to process when you realize that many of the things you claim to live your life by in fact, haven't been present in the way you live your life at all.

Tis a staggering emotion indeed. I wonder if it has a name. Until I figure out the appropriate descriptor, I will call it Emotion Self-Destruct.