In A Primer for Forgetting, scholar and critic Lewis Hyde explores the idea that forgetting can be as useful as remembering—and that, in fact, the two are not opposed but work in concert with each other. This idea sparked for him when he was studying the importance of memory, and in reading about the old oral cultures who passed knowledge through... See more

Hyde might call a Maiden Funeral a form of “active forgetting”—an intentional and respectful loosening of one’s grip on the past in favor of embracing the present. In this light, I wonder if the anxiety I experienced on my final day in London was my subconscious reckoning with the fact that I was trying to move forward by going back, by refusing to... See more