Only a few dozen pages into Silas Marner, I can already relate to the old miser. As payment for his services as a weaver, he collects the gold guineas, but he refuses to spend them. The stockpile only grows within that hidden compartment in the brick floor, habitually unearthed only to revel in the beauty they hold in themselves. That is, until they are stolen out from under him, in one of but a few moments of carelessness in his life. A “carelessness” (or rather, one uncharacteristically lax evening in a life of heightened paranoia and obsession-compulsion) borne out of a sudden desire to finally entreat oneself to luxuries or comforts not usually accepted. In Marner’s case, a modest piece of meat, and so, he devises a mechanism using his door key and a piece of thread to hold it above the fire, so as not to overcook the meat while he is away. There was no reason for Silas to expect the spoiled and conniving Dunstan Cass to find his cottage unlocked at the precise moment of his absence. Now, I have not finished the novel, but I can assume the old weaver learns to, essentially, get over it, realize his life is the same, if not better, without it irrepressibly weighing on his mind. This misfortune too will pass, absorbed into the Lethean depths of time and memory. Memory was never designed to be infallible or incorruptible: our best attempts to reverse its progressive decay are still subject to the same universal Newtonian laws of linear time. It would be foolish to assume digital memory would be infinite in this respect, at least, that’s what I’m telling myself. The structure of memory was not disrupted or revolutionized, it was recreated, offloaded, digitized. Time goes on, and an object in motion must stay in motion. There is no choice in the matter.
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