I watch my father as he sits alone in a large room full of people. For long minutes, he stares into nothingness. This from a man who was always connected, who exuded confidence even in his lowest moments. By trade, he is an actor; that is, he is known for becoming other people. On stage, he delivered lines from others. He did it with such aplomb, with such gusto, you would be forgiven for thinking he was honest. Except that he was; it’s just that he dealt in other people’s honesty.
Now his memory is fading. He forgets what he told me a minute ago. Or he repeats the same sentence over again. Have you packed your suitcase before you leave? Did you send me the number I asked for? I say yes time and again, but it’s a lost battle. His memory is entering the unimpeded river we call oblivion.
I love him dearly and should feel pity for the state he is in. His forgetting is dangerous because the rest of us depend on him knowing where he is, what he wants and what he needs. But I don’t feel pity. Actually, it is rather the opposite: The progressive loss feels rather normal to me. Forgetting is the natural state of things. Memory is an interruption, a spark of light in between two enormities of darkness.
Things don’t remember. Animals and plants do have memory, but it is different from ours as humans. Human memory is fragile, capricious and unexplainable. Its most salient feature is that it is curated, like a museum exhibit.
I used to think memory needed to be celebrated. Sometimes I still do, although less and less. Now I think it’s a delusion I bought into. We all buy into it as part of our education: Without memory, there is no organized life. What we aren’t told is that that organization is transitory — and that it isn’t truly ours. We have it for a while, which is by all accounts short, and then we don’t.
Even when we do have it, we transmogrify it. What we think we remember is actually a reinvention we adorn with figurines from fantasy. Memory is a stage with an unfolding play whose entire cast is invented. The play is never real, just as the past, as William Faulkner said, isn’t past; it is never dead. But he was wrong: The past is forever dead. And so are the characters of the play: fictional, a perversion.
Memory is physical; forgetting, anything but. Only the living remember; the dead don’t. (We remember for them.) We are taught to celebrate memory, since we are trained to cherish control. We want to own, to possess. We tell ourselves that the more we remember, the more we have; and the more we have, the stronger we become. It is all a lie, obviously. Memory is just the appearance of control. That’s because even if we wanted it, just a small portion of what we do can be remembered. Our faculties allow us only a general grasp of reality. What we retain, what we recall, is vague. It becomes vaguer as time goes by. Time is the enemy of memory.
Age has allowed me to appreciate the two parallel tracks of memory: one internal, the other external. The difference is clear when dealing with dementia, as in my father’s case. A couple of months ago, he left the house to go shopping … and along the way, he got lost. He forgot where he was going. But he didn’t forget who he was.
Our external memories are dispensable; I would even call them cheap. We don’t really care what we ate yesterday. We did yesterday, of course, but yesterday is not today. Today we have other important items to deal with, including what we are about to eat. We must let go of what came before and also of what will come after in order to live in the present. Otherwise, we are paralyzed.
Internal memories are deep. In terms of emotional capital, they are at once expensive and expansive because they relate to who we are at the core. We won’t easily forget them since we need them to function. They aren’t in our mind but in our being. They go with us to the grave.
It is the capacity to forget that enables us to think. If we were able to retain every detail of every minute of every day in our lives, we would succumb to the weight of it all. A person with such endowment is a monster. Instead, we make generalizations, which we call abstractions. Those abstractions depend on inferences. To think is to make connections, from which we generate insights.
Every generation remembers more. Although this no doubt is a burden, it is best to bear it with humility. Another burden is to watch our predecessors give in to forgetting, as I’m doing these days with my father. And as my children will likely do with me.
Conversely, it is a joy to witness a baby remembering a word, repeating a motion. Loss and gain and loss again … These are the cycles of construction and destruction: We take control of things only to surrender to them futilely.
In a way, I envy my father’s retreat. When young, I wanted to be remembered, thinking that memory was synonymous with success. Now that I see my name on a book cover or hear references to my name on the radio, the feeling I get is of fatuousness. I know that everything I do — including these words — will be forgotten, as it should. What survives, at best, is an echo.
Because no matter how strenuously we battle against it, oblivion always prevails.
Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, the publisher of Restless Books, and the host of “In Contrast” on NEPR.