The Non-Remembrance of Things Past - Page 14


You have a feeling that there was one more thing you could do, but, try as you can, you can't remember what it was.17

1. Ed. Note: Ted Williams, Boston Red Sox,.369.

2. Ed. Note: You left them in your overcoat.

3. Ed. Note: Olympic Office Supply Corp.

4. Ed. Note: You did.

5. Ed. Note: Jimmy Buffett.

6. Ed. Note: "Forgetting of Names and Order of Words," Chapter 3 of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901)

7. Ed. Note: No.

8. Ed. Note: You mean the 1892 poem by Rudyard Kipling, not the 1939 movie base upon it.

9. Ed. Note: And the two of you need a third guy for the area code.

10. Ed. Note: "Palin-like bumbling and confusion" might be more up-to-date.

11. Only you know the answers to these questions.

12. Ed. Note: Martin Balsam for A Thousand Clowns.

13. Ed. Note: You did and you have. (If this sounds like bragging, that's because it is. You have to admit it: as proud as you are of your (relative) honesty, you're not shamed by your ever-increasing ignorance.)

14. Ed. Note: Anything, that is, other than where you left those damn keys. (At least for now, anyway.)

15. "During the twenty years of Odysseus' absence, the people of Ithaca retained many recollections of him, but never felt nostalgia for him. Whereas Odysseus did suffer nostalgia, and remembered almost nothing.

"We can comprehend this curious contradiction if we realize that for memory to function well, it needs constant practice: if recollections are not evoked again and again, in conversations with friends, they go. Emigres gathered together in compatriot colonies keep retelling to the point of nausea the same stories, which thereby become unforgettable. But people who do not spend time with their compatriots, like . . . Odysseus, are inevitably stricken with amnesia." Milan Kundera, Ignorance.

16. Ed. Note: Mai Men Dong, Sheng Di Huang, Tian Men Dong, Xuan Shen, among others.

17. Ed. Note: Laugh.

Fred Wistow lives, he thinks, in New York City. He remembers his e-mail address as: fredwistow@aol.com. Letters to the Editor about this article may be e-mailed to ­letters@psychnetworker.org.

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