## Metadata - Author: [[Lewis Hyde]] - Full Title: A Primer for Forgetting - Category: #books ## Highlights - MANY YEARS AGO, reading about the old oral - Tags: [[blue]] - Memory and forgetting: these are the faculties of mind by which we are aware of time, and time is a mystery. In addition, a long tradition holds that the imagination is best conceived as operating with a mixture of memory and forgetting. Creation—things coming into being that never were before—that too is a mystery. Writers like me who work very slowly are well advised to settle on topics such as these, topics whose fascination may never be exhausted. Such authors do not simply tell us what they know; they invite us to join them in fronting the necessary limits of our knowing. - Tags: [[blue]] - glass case outside our classroom. My teacher Mrs. Swenson inspected my offering and gave her critique: I had misspelled “canoe.” - Nietzsche recommended an “unhistorical” frame of mind figured as a fertile clouding of temporal categories, a “living whirlpool in a dead sea of night and forgetting” that could become the “cradle of deeds.” “The man of action … forgets a great deal to do one thing.”