I have written before in this column — or I think I have, but I can’t quite remember — that one of my greatest shortcomings as a husband is that I am extremely forgetful. I fail to remember birthdays, the addresses of neighbours, the location of roads and, occasionally, the names of my children. It is a grievous fault, I cannot deny, and one I have been apologising for since I was about six.
There will be those who believe that this is not some failed circuitry in my brain, but a kind of wilful neglectfulness — that I won’t make the effort to remember such things because I am lazy or because they are unimportant to me. And given my lack of self-knowledge — another fault — I cannot say whether this is true.
I would attempt only one defence of my habitual forgetfulness, which is that forgetting is not always such a bad trait. If you count memory as important, then perhaps it is also true that forgettory is crucial. For what we forget and what we remember are a key part of who we become. What we remember of our lives is like the evening sky where we see a few night stars in the foreground, while the multitudes are hidden from our view.
The fact that I forget things, either by choice or chance, that are good and useful, must at least be balanced with the fact that I also forget things that are painful and harmful. In this sense, forgetfulness can be a good thing. One often hears the phrase, when some past slight is examined, “I’ve forgiven, but I haven’t forgotten”. Translation: “I haven’t forgiven.” Whereas I may not have forgiven, but usually I have forgotten, and it amounts to much the same thing.
I used to think that absent-mindedness was vaguely charming, at least as displayed in myself — my mother may have found it endearing that I “lived in a little world of my own” (a phrase that appears with regularity on my primary school reports). As an adult and a married man, I now realise that it is deeply frustrating and infuriating for others, so I have come to feel ashamed of it, as well as being frustrated by it myself. After all, it is not as if I wanted to leave my new laptop in Starbucks (as I did a few months ago).
But as I accept my guilt, or my flaw, I must also take credit for my virtue in not caring too much about the past. This is, I confess, something of a conscious decision (or possibly a rationalisation) as I am fond of Zen philosophy, which emphasises the importance of the present over the past or future.
In any case, I think that, in the context of a relationship, it is some compensation for all those missed appointments and forgotten school performances. Ignorance, some people say, is bliss, and although I wouldn’t go that far, I would say that ignorance of the past is useful. It may be true, of course, that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
On the other hand, those who forget the past are relieved of its burden; a burden that will unfortunately be a shared one. You can always be determined to remember to remember — or you can forgive and forget, or you can simply forget. For to recover from anything traumatic or painful, you have to be always wiping the slate clean. Such is the power of forgettory.
Lethe, the river of forgetfulness in Greek mythology, was a place of healing. As Seneca wrote: “Within the abyss, Lethe, measureless in sweep, glides smoothly on with placid stream, and takes away our cares.” Lethe was the passage to the underworld, but we could in modern terms see it as the passage to the unconscious, where our memories are mercifully wiped clean.
Or that’s my excuse, anyway.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Tim Lott is a journalist and author. His latest book is Under the Same Stars.
