Don't you sometimes wish you could watch your life as a film, again and again, fast-forwarding through the embarrassing moments, freezing the wonderful scenes so that you could zoom in, have a closer look, memorize all the magical details, re-live every second several times until your whole being was saturated with warmth and sweetness and nostalgia?

Is this a fantasy a byproduct of our camera-obsessed culture, I wonder, or did people dream of re-playable memories long before the invention of film?