Praised be Mnemosyne, Goddess of Memory and mother of the Muses.
Let's start with the question: What do we actually return to when we remember? A place, a person, something that happened. But we return with a mind that has continued living since then. Something we could not understand at the time may become clearer years later, even though the event itself has remained the same.
This is what interests me about Interstellar. The film gives that familiar experience a very unusual form: a father reaches his daughter through moments that already belong to her childhood.
Some context first, because the story has quite a few layers.
Earth is becoming increasingly uninhabitable through crop blight and dust storms. Cooper, a former pilot, lives as a farmer with his father-in-law and his two children, Tom and Murph. As a child, Murph believes something is haunting her bedroom. Books fall from the shelves, and patterns appear in the dust.
Cooper eventually joins a mission through a wormhole near Saturn. Plan A depends on solving a gravitational equation that would allow humanity to leave Earth aboard enormous space stations. Plan B carries human embryos to establish a colony elsewhere if the people on Earth cannot be saved.
The connection to memory becomes especially interesting when Cooper enters the black hole and finds himself within the tesseract, a structure through which different moments in Murph’s bedroom become accessible to him. He understands this place as something constructed by future humans. There's themes of faith, hope and love. He then recognises the presence that frightened and intrigued his daughter: he was her “ghost.”
Think about what this does to a childhood memory. Something Murph experienced before she could understand it becomes understandable through something her father has yet to do. Almost like a paradox.
The movie also presents some key 'props' like a watch. Cooper transmits quantum data from inside the black hole via Morse code through the hands of Murph’s childhood watch. Adult Murph uses the data to solve the gravity equation, fulfilling Plan A and evacuating Earth.
In the Temple’s Memory and Forgetting sermon, we have this description:
Memory is the soul’s hold on time: what it keeps from the past and what it lets go
I want to keep this quote beside the film, especially the relationship between holding something and understanding what we are holding.
We use the word memory for several things. There is our own experience, the events we remember living through. There is recollection, when we deliberately try to recover something. There is what we inherit through stories, teaching and objects that belonged to others. Within the spiritual understanding we are exploring, and remembrance can also concern the soul’s origin and continuity beyond one lifetime.
These meanings can meet, but it helps to notice where the connection happens.
Take the watch for example. Cooper uses it to help Murph. It is such a small object to carry something on which so many lives depend. But why would she return to that particular object? It already belongs to their relationship. Before it carries data, it carries the memory of her father and the promise of his return. The thing that measures their separation also becomes something through which they can communicate.
This also brings me back to the questions NP Karnonnos shared with us in VT:
How do you think memories can shape a person completely? Is someone’s mind in terms of thinking about the past just a collection of memories or more than that?
I would begin with the word collection. We can retain many things, but something in us also relates them, questions them, gives them significance. Two people may remember the same encounter and carry very different understandings of it. Even within one person, those understandings can change.
Murph’s memory of her father belongs to this difficulty. A promise, an absence, something she cannot explain. Recognising him later does not remove the years she lived without him. It does, however, allow her to reconsider what his absence meant. Maybe this is one way memory shapes identity: through the relationships we continue to make with what happened. We are someone’s child, someone who waited, someone who made a promise. Those meanings can remain important even when age and circumstances have changed almost beyond recognition.
The Temple’s Recollection Meditation gives attention a central place in deliberate recall. It moves through recent, emotionally charged and childhood memories, bringing sensory detail into focus while asking us to observe our responses. Murph returning to her room offers an image through which I can approach this. A familiar place may contain details we stopped examining because we thought we already knew its story. What happens when we look again with a different question?
Of course, the film gives Cooper actual access to earlier moments within its fictional world. Recollection does not establish that we have physically returned to an event, and a vivid memory still needs care when we interpret it. The useful connection, for me, is the quality of attention: being willing to revisit something without deciding in advance what we must find.
This leads us to Plato.
In Meno 81a–d, Socrates connects inquiry with the soul’s prior learning and repeated lives:
For seeking and learning are, after all, wholly recollection.
This reaches further than remembering our childhood. It asks how knowledge can become available to us, and how inquiry can begin when we do not yet understand what we are seeking.
Murph gives us a useful comparison, although the different movements need to remain visible. She remembers an experience, recognises something about its meaning, and receives information she did not previously possess. Remembering, understanding and learning all participate in what she does.
Aristotle’s account of recollection helps with another part of this. He describes the search through associations: something similar, opposite or connected can give us a starting point. A detail leads us toward what we are trying to recover. But finding a connection still leaves us with the work of understanding it. And then another question opens up for me. If what we learn is valuable, how much depends on it remaining ours?
A parent teaches a child something the child will eventually use independently. A person leaves notes that someone else can develop. An act of care makes a possibility available to someone who may never know where it began. There is continuity here too, carried through other lives.
This does not "solve" the question of the soul’s memory. It gives us something we can examine in our present actions: what are we developing that could remain useful beyond the moment in which we acquired it?
A later self, a child, an unknown successor. What could we leave them so that they do not have to begin entirely again?
That is why I find Interstellar fascinating and maybe even relevant to day to day life. We may return to an old place or remember a conversation and discover that we can finally ask something of it that we could not ask before. The experience has remained with us, our ability to understand it has grown.
When a memory returns, maybe we can ask what we understand now that we could not understand then, and what that understanding allows us to do next.