Four thoughts:1. It is not just a sad thing to forget history, forgetfulness is an absolutely essential gift and a necessary condition to live. Of course SOME of us should be burdened with memory, so that the horrible events of the past are not continued, but those so burdened should be singled out as exceptional individuals who have taken on a burden that normal people should not have to bear. If we ALL remembered the past, NONE of us would be able to get past the injuries and injustices and harm and murder and warfare of the past; we would be living in a war of all against all, because everybody has some connection to some murderous past. The only way to continue to live is to forget that the Japanese tried to murder my father, or that the Vietnamese tried to murder me, so that I can go to Tokyo and feel "safe" and my daughter could go to Vietnam and also feel safe. Thank God for such forgetfulness! It allows us all to get along, despite our past.
2. Even in learning a new skill like hitting a baseball, or reading a novel, forgetfulness is a gift and memory is an unnecessary burden. The Tao Teh Ching says that we need to forget as much as we need to remember, and this is literally true: In hitting a baseball, there are dozens of things we have to learn about stance, hands, swing, eye coordination, etc. etc. But when we DO learn to hit the ball, it's because we can forget all that and just swing. If we had to go through all of those steps each time we tried to hit, it just wouldn't work. We forget the individual steps, but we have learned how to hit. Forgetfulness, as a part of memory, must be trained and shaped and tended to, else we can't learn at all. Even in reading a novel, we must forget each word we read and remember the story. What would happen if a reader could recite word for word everything she had read? Would that person really be said to have read the "story" or just the words? Forgetfulness is an absolutely essential part of every bit of learning.
3. The above is written by a 66 year old man who finds that forgetfulness is indeed a personal blessing; it is not as essential to remember nearly as much as I thought it would be essential to remember when I was a young 'un looking at those really old 66 year old men around me. Linda in "Death of a Salesman" says "Life is a casting-off" and this is true in personal memory as well as collective memory. What is essential and what is accidental is decided by what is remembered and what is forgotten.
4. The young German historian below is a good teacher. Of course it's more difficult in history to look for what's not there, but in reading an author, it's easier to read for what he has not written. That's a higher-level reading skill not taught as much as it should be. After finishing Aristotle's Ethics, what did he not write about that he could have but that he mostly left out? After finishing a novel, what parts of the story did the author leave out, purposefully? What part of a post is the part that nobody replies to?
David Ritchie wrote:
On Jun 11, 2012, at 10:42 PM, cblists@xxxxxxxx wrote: On 12-Jun-12, at 12:36 AM, David Ritchie wrote: ... Should someone, I wonder, begin a petition drive to sponsor a memorial to the Ignorant of History? They too must have had virtues, grandmothers, cute children. ... [Entertaining cat and ignorant neighbour story follows.]Cf.: "Writer Thomas Pynchon articulated about the scope and structure of one's ignorance: 'Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person's mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well. So as a corollary to [the advice of] writing about what we know, maybe we should add getting familiar with our ignorance, and the possibilities therein for writing a good story.'"This reminds me of a young German historian who urged us to write about what was missing from the archives, histories of gaps. Negative space is difficult to describe.
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