Memory and Forgetting

Identifier: SD-088.
Original Publication: Novedades — Sunday Supplement, August 8, 1948.
Author: LIC. OSCAR MÉNDEZ CERVANTES.
Topics: Philosophy and Culture.

By LIC. OSCAR MÉNDEZ CERVANTES

In the marvelous living architecture of human psychology, the faculty of making present what is remote in space or time is certainly not among its least admirable elements. The exercise of memory is so habitual and spontaneous—being one of the very conditions of our existence—that it very rarely engages our reflection. But when it does, when on some occasion we pause to consider that faculty of the spirit and the extraordinary mechanisms that move it, one marvel follows another.

In what hidden storehouse of the psyche are life's experiences, concepts, images, feelings and sensations deposited, and even complex states of mind that have their place in that filing cabinet, sometimes perfectly classified, sometimes disordered and without arrangement?… No one could say, yet everyone makes constant use of the “stock” in that storehouse, always filled to overflowing.

Memory often requires the key of effort, of an express and conscious intention, to open its doors to us. Yet frequently those doors open of their own accord, or at least without our turning the latch, like those modern “photoelectric” doors that swing on their hinges when a foreign body interrupts the electric beam that keeps them closed. Then a whole swarm of recollections and reminiscences we have not summoned emerges into consciousness, unexpectedly presenting itself to our attention, now blurred and misty, now vivid and distinct.

Memory, then, can in part be governed and subjected to a certain discipline and control, so as to summon precisely the elements we desire and reject those that for the moment hinder us or perhaps harm us. This is the concern of the most useful art of mnemonics, with its more or less effective rules. Nevertheless, the most fortunate memories—in their most extraordinary examples—are rather a gift of nature. Such was the case with Menéndez y Pelayo, of whom it is said that after reading any book—among the thousands he managed to read—he could refer accurately, if not to the exact words, then to the page and the place upon it where any important idea in the work was expressed. This is true of all prodigies of memory. No system of mnemonics can equal them.

Be that as it may, the fact remains that remembering can be delight and torment, the soul's life or its suffering. The austere Nietzsche once said: “It is impossible to live without forgetting.” A great truth. Whoever forgot nothing would have all his experiences exclusively in what was: he could not live in what is “hic et nunc,” here and now. Yet it is also true that remembering something of the past is a constant necessity if we are to live in the present, which—to a certain extent—rests upon that past and draws its sustenance from it. This holds equally for peoples and for individuals. There are memories of events, people, situations, triumphs or defeats, affections or hatreds that never leave us, or at least should never leave us, because that would be tantamount to denying ourselves. A man who consigns his parents to oblivion, who suffers a culpable amnesia concerning the benefits he has received or all that has in some way breathed worth and nobility into his personal existence, is an inferior man. Peoples without tradition—which is, precisely, social memory—are, insofar as they lack it, peoples without dynamism and without the capacity for authentic progress.

Peoples and individuals alike inevitably require a minimum of recollection, of memory of what they have been, even to possess an awareness of their own identity, of the continuity and persistence of the self through time and history.

And if forgetting old pages, dark or excessively painful, sometimes becomes a necessity for the tormented spirit, on other occasions remembrance becomes a necessity through its instructive fruits or its life-giving longings. And always, the white, golden pages, radiant with goodness, poetry, truth, great achievements and exalted presences that, by one path or another, have beneficently influenced our destiny, lay upon us the duty to keep them alive, present and overwhelmingly active in our life today, through the miraculous gift, the blessed artifice, of memory.