... or consider,   Quite another is the impression as an affection resulting from the shock of an event that can be said to be striking, marking. This impression is essentially undergone, experienced. It is tacitly presupposed in the very metaphor of the typos (imprint) at the moment the seal is pressed into the wax, inasmuch as it is the soul that receives the imprint. ...beginning of the dialogue, Socrates proposes: "And is it not memory and perception that lead to judgement or the attempt to come to a definite judgement as the case may be?" Protarchus acquiesces. Then comes the example of someone who wants to "distinguish" what appears to him from afar to be a man. What happens when it is to himself that he addresses his questions? Socrates proposes: "That our soul in such a situation is comparable to a book." How so? asks Protarchus. The explanation follows: "If memory and perceptions concur with other impressions at a particular occasions, then they seem to inscribe [graphein] words in our soul, as it were. ...imprint to that of drawing, of inscription (graphe)--- it belongs to the notion of inscription that it contain a reference to the other; the other-than-affection as such. Absence, as the other of presence!                                                            

Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, The University of Chicago Press, pp.8,17.