It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. “To think,” Borges writes, “is to forget.
In a sense, the elaborate system of externalized memory we’ve created is a way of fending off mortality.
If you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember.
The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it.
Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory.
To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.
Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.
What makes things memorable is that they are meaningful, significant, colorful.