The manners of forgetting

Many years ago, while I was reading about ancient oral cultures, where wisdom and history lived in the tongues instead of books, I was intrigued by a short note I read at the time that oral societies maintain their balance ... by discarding memories that no longer have current importance. My interest at that time was focused on memory itself, and on the valuable ways in which people and cultures resort to preserving the past in memory, and I found that this note was contrary to what I was interested in and sparked my innate desire to oppose things, so I started collecting snippets from other cases proving that abandoning the past is also beneficial, such as preserving it. It became clear to me that this book, which ultimately resulted from these snippets, is an experiment in both thought and form. Regarding the intellectual experiment, it seeks to test the hypothesis that forgetting can be more beneficial than memory, or that memory works better in parallel with forgetting. And of course, I do not mean that glorifying forgetting means opposing memory; any worthwhile experiment must lead to results. And so was the experiment I conducted. Just as I did, there is no doubt that readers will stop at some cases to say: "No, we must remember this." The paradox here is that encouraging resistance to forgetting in itself highlights one of the functions of forgetting. Author: Louis Hyde Publication date: 2024 Publisher: Wasm Publications Number of pages: 396