In Praise of Forgetfulness

My memory is terrible. I've often thought that I need ginkgo to help me remember things. Honestly, I've contemplated grinding up the leaves and eating them (there are loads of ginkgo trees in Georgetown on one street [I think it's 34th] and they look lovely in the fall when they turn bright yellow). But I also think that forgetfulness is pretty important: I imagine that when God sent Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, he gave them a little forgetfulness as a gift.

Hannah Arendt writes about the supremely human capacity to forgive, but I think that she slightly overstates things: as Alexander Pope tells us, to forgive is divine. I have a feeling that human beings can do a little bit of forgiving, and that forgetting helps them along with that process.

We forget pain (this is why people have more than one child, I think), and we even forget some good things that are gone (it makes us miss them less).


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