The Man Who Cast His Memories To The Stars

He was an older guy, overweight, who walked slowly with a cane.  Most clear nights he could be found sitting on a park bench after sunset, slumping over the back of the bench and tilting his head backwards to look at the darkening sky.

Curiosity got the better of me one evening, so I walked up to him and asked him what he was looking for up there in the emptiness.  

He smiled back at me, and replied, "I'm not looking for anything, young man."

My quizzical look prompted him to add, "I'm casting my memories to the stars."  Evidently he believed that he could "preserve" the pleasant memories of his life by mentally sending them out into space.  

I didn't ask him how he thought such a thing could possibly work, but instead asked him if he were preserving all his memories, or just the pleasant ones.

He scoffed at such a stupid question.  "Of course not!  Sad, unhappy, painful memories: they are all cast into the pit of oblivion, where they belong.  Why would I want to spend another second with those miserable things!"

Then he excitedly pointed up at a star.  "There!  See it?  That's the summer I spent with my friend catching bees and other insects and putting them in jars.  And there's an earlier summer a group of us wandered down to the creek and caught salamanders and crayfish.  And there are the times I rode my bicycle all the way to the library, to borrow books."

It's ludicrous, of course, to suppose that his memories were somehow existing outside of his mind in outer space, but if it made him happy to believe it, then so be it.  Most of us believe sillier things which make us miserable.

And so I have to ask you, who is the bigger fool?