Remembering is forgetting

“When we study, discuss, analyze a reality, we analyze it as it appears in our mind, in our memory. We know reality only in the past tense. We do not know it as it is in the present, in the moment when it is happening, when it is. The present moment is unlike the memory of it. Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is the form of forgetting.” – Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed, quoted by J. Blustein, The Moral Demands of Memory (Cambridge 2008).

About Huenemann

Curious about the ways humans use their minds and hearts to distract themselves from the meaninglessness of life.
This entry was posted in Meanings of life / death / social & moral stuff. Bookmark the permalink.

3 Responses to Remembering is forgetting

  1. Rob says:

    Wonder what Blustein makes of the Proustian epiphany in which the past is recovered — “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract” — by the evocative power of a present stimulus.

    Like

  2. Faye says:

    “Before you drift off, don’t forget.
    Which is to say, remember.
    Because remembering is so much more a psychotic activity than forgetting.”

    -Waking Life

    Like

  3. Heck, just perceiving is a form of forgetting.

    Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s