'Memory is that instant when past and present collide'

As good a concise description as I've ever read.

It's from W.T. Tyler's elegiacal final novel, "The Consul's Wife."

In context: "Memory is that instant when past and present collide; two speeding trains hurtling toward each other on the same track, demolishing the moment and everything else...."

And: "I wanted to tell her what she meant to me, wanted to say that with most people I knew, even those who believed themselves more sensitive and civilized, moral discovery was as fitful as epilepsy, and maybe that's why they wander through the National Gallery on gray afternoons or attend Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach concerts, trying to recover again for a few hours a sense of the miraculous, to know that courage they'd lost touch with in their daily lives. But with a few rare people courage of spirit is more or less constant, never dims, and in their presence you discover what you might never have known at all."

You could do worse with your $1.06.