It is conceivable that elderly people customarily boast good recollection of distant events precisely because they have had ample time to forget or simply obliterate everything but the residual essentials—essentials at least from the vantage point of their experience and circumstances—which can then be more readily brought to consciousness, rehearsed for a while among friends and relatives, and ultimately repeated without blinking, with minor alterations and embellishments fitting the occasion, to anyone who does not object to such abuses of the past. For the past was intricate, indeed. Good memory is perhaps nothing but a reflection of healthy oblivion toward so many things that threaten to overcrowd our fragile minds and to render us speechless in the prime of our lives.

Addendum I (September 3, 1998)

My father’s memory has been visibly ebbing for a few years and at an ever-faster pace. It is pretty much gone by now. He has forgotten so many people, events, things, that my mother cannot maintain even a rudimentary conversation with him. However, he is not aware of all this. Yesterday at dinner I tried to talk with my father about his problems. I gave him several simple examples of his memory loss—such as that he could not remember two out of three people who came over for dinner the previous night. Then I asked him whether he thought there was anything amiss with his recollection. He said there was nothing wrong with it. He was fine, he insisted, but there were few things worth remembering. Put the other way around, everything he had forgotten was worth forgetting. And there is no denying that this makes some sense.

Addendum II (September 28, 2016)

Now that I am squarely among the elderly myself, and no kidding, what do I have to say about these ruminations of my, as it were, youth? Concerning the original piece, which I wrote when I was thirty-seven, there is no doubt that many stories about times past I still like to tell when circumstances permit are so streamlined by now that they are hardly about the past any longer. Adjusted to the needs of the present over and over again, they are quite timeless by now. Although I can easily place them in time and space, my favorite stories tell me little about either. I remember them mainly for their entertainment value. They are just stories. And the punch line is always the same, like in a joke.

Regarding the first addendum, which I wrote when I was fifty-two, it is amazing how much I have forgotten over the years. And I know this is the case because I am often stumped when I read my own writings. Many of the names that are spelled out in my pieces escape me by now. Often enough, the people in question are complete mysteries to me. I do not remember anything about them. My usual defense is that I have lived in too many places in my seventy years. Much of the knowledge of one place has turned out to be entirely irrelevant in the next one. My father was suffering from senile dementia, all right, but his arguments still holds in much of what happens to us all. A good deal is worth forgetting, to be sure. And fast.

Returning to the original piece, I am delighted by its conclusion. Good memory, or what appears as good memory, is perforce selective. Healthy oblivion is essential in this connection, for remembering too much would render us incapable of interpreting our memories, let alone talking about them coherently. This is where my writings come handy in many different ways. I can always search through them on the World Wide Web. More often than not, I can place anything I care about in both time and space. And in a jiffy. Remembering it all would be no less than oppressive, but searching for it is not. In fact, it can even be enchanting. To wit, I am writing so as to better forget whatever I am writing about. A delightful ruse, this. Write so as to forget!