Notes on Forgetting

Memory is not a record. It is a story we tell ourselves about what happened, revised with each telling. The neuroscientists have known this for decades. The rest of us are still catching up.

I have been thinking about what I have forgotten. Not the things I know I have forgotten — those are, by definition, inaccessible — but the things I notice are missing when I try to reconstruct a particular time or place. The gaps in the record. The places where the story goes quiet.

I cannot remember my grandmother's voice. I can remember that she had a particular way of saying my name — a slight elongation of the first syllable, a warmth in it — but I cannot hear it anymore. The memory of the memory remains. The thing itself is gone.

There is a word in Portuguese — saudade — that is often translated as a longing for something lost, but this is not quite right. Saudade is the feeling of longing for something you are not sure you ever fully had. It is the grief of the almost-remembered.

I think a great deal of what we call nostalgia is actually saudade. We are not mourning the past as it was. We are mourning the past as we wished it had been, or as we half-remember it being, which is not the same thing.

The things I remember most clearly are often the things that surprised me. The unexpected detail, the moment that did not fit the pattern. Memory, it seems, is drawn to the anomalous. The ordinary days — the good, unremarkable days — are the hardest to hold onto.

I am trying to pay more attention to the ordinary days. I am trying to notice them while they are happening, to press them into some more durable form. I am not sure this works. I am not sure memory can be willed into accuracy.

But I keep trying. I keep writing things down. Not because I trust the record, but because the act of recording is itself a form of attention, and attention is the closest thing I have to a solution to the problem of forgetting.

Which is not a solution. But it is something.