forgetting

Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?

There are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot - that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways staring eyes.

At a time when history made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop, known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures. Nowadays, time moves forward at a rapid pace. Forgotten overnight, a historic event glistens the next day like the morning dew and thus is no longer the backdrop to a narrator's tale but rather an amazing adventure enacted against the background of the over-familiar banality of private life.

Memory is curated. All this paraphernalia you collect to ward off forgetting

I relinquished myself to existence pure and simple, thinking absolutely nothing__s if my mind were merely an echo chamber for the music, as if it contained only ether or at most a vaguely pleasant odor as of roses preserved between the pages of a book, their significance long forgotten. The tongue of the road gobbled me up and I allowed myself to sink like a tasty mouthful all the way to the bottom of a marvelous, rejuvenating vacuity. Later, it would occur to me it__ the emptiness we mistakenly call Innocence.

One who cannot leave himself behind on the threshold of the moment and forget the past, who cannot stand on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without fear or giddiness, will never know what happiness is; and, worse still, will never do anything that makes others happy.

That's just the way it is. I'll always remember. She's forgotten.

Of course she wants him to forget her. The last place she wants to reside is in his thoughts. What an unpleasant place to be.

Forgiveness is an attribute we must practice , as we all want the Al-mighty to forgive us. But forgetting and trusting again with a revivifying attitude is undoubtedly stark exhausting . We have a wonderful memory like a nostalgic alarm which hurdles us in bandaging the heart and mind just like a new one.

The assassination of Allende quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia caused the Sinai to be forgotten, and so on, and on and on, until everyone has completely forgotten everything.

No one really remembers anything five minutes after it happens.

When a memory fails to appear, it seems as though the time when it was created did not really exist, and maybe that is true. Time itself is nothing; only the experience of it is something. When that dies, it assumes the form of a denial, the symbol of mortality, what you have already lost before you lose everything. When his friend had said something similar to his father, his response had been, "If you had to retain everything, you__ explode. There__ simply not enough space for it all. Forgetting is like medicine; you have to take it at the right time.

There is a goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne; but none of Forgetting. Yet there should be, as they are twin sisters, twin powers, and walk on either side of us, disputing for sovereignty over us and who we are, all the way until death.

...first, in order to remember, something must be forgotten; second, the place where memories are stored has no boundaries. In other words, forgetting is a twin; its tandem effect is best called "simultancous" distraction, the instant when one memory defoliates another. This fuzzy double - one devouring the other - presumably inhibits learning

But then comes a time when forgetting isn't possible. And I do mean a particular time when no amount of dreaming, not then and maybe not ever, can change how naked and unimportant we become in our own eyes.

Some things you never forgot. She had come to believe that the very things the practical world dismissed as ephemera__hings like songs and moonlight and kisses__ere sometimes the things that lasted the longest. They might be foolish, but they defied forgetting. And that was good. That was good.

To remember nothing," they would say. "What more could one possibly ask of eternity?

The more she tried to forget, the more she remembered.