“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).
Getting distracted by ideas
Remembering is forgetting
3 responses to “Remembering is forgetting”
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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.
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“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
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Heck, just perceiving is a form of forgetting.
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Huenemanniac 
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