#220: When forgetting is good

“I didn’t want to lose anything. That was the main problem,” Sarah Manguso writes on the opening page of Ongoingness , her short book about learning to let herself forget things . She long fears being “lost in time,” until finally she realizes (as I’ve quoted once before), “the forgotten moments are the price of continued participation in life.” In... See more

Forgetting is a feature, not a bug. It makes us feel like we’re moving forward through time, rather than standing still or running in circles. My grandmother and her ancestors knew this all too well. Artful forgetting, editing, and curation allowed them to craft narratives that helped their children understand the past and orient towards the future... See more