26 April 2008

REMEMBERING NOT TO FORGET

“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.

In existential mathematics, that experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”
Milan Kundera, Slowness (1995)


Cockatoo Island, Sydney, April 2008, jb

Posted by JACKY BOWRING at 17:36:51 | Permanent Link | Comments (1) |
Comments
1 - This sounds good, but it is merely provocative nonsense--from a novelist who is reckless in his theorizing. It is just as true to say a man speeds up when he remembers something, as if to increase the pace of his remembering, and even to find the memory itself in the future of his walking. Or, that he slows down when forgetting, as if considering the dire consequences of his not being able to remember. The assumption behind Kundera's easy formulation is that memory and forgetting are related like extremes of the same phenomena. Just as likely, they are two completely different experiences. (Comment this)

Written by: Lloyd Mintern at 2008/04/26 - 19:23:12
Write a comment