sub specie durationis

Human beings are the ones to have the conscious ability to reflect themselves and adjust their thoughts and behaviors.

That is enabled by the special ability, which can be called "declarative memory" in psychological term.

Memory is the mass of the past whose parts are projected to the future.

In order to make the most use of memory in online manner, it has to be organized in some manner.

One of the most basic ones is "episodic organization," or, to arrange one's personal experience related to "where" and "when."

Episodic memory, compared to semantic memory, can be less abstract and redundant. However, because of its redundancy, many beautiful entities can remain and retrieved as they were, protected by their original context.

Think about diary, which reflects things in a way bound by dates and places. The subtle sparkles, which would not survive in homogeneous abstract space, live on there.

Sub specie durationis - H. Bergson