Author: Hyde, Lewis
Title: A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past
Publisher: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux
Year: 2019
Link: https://worldcat.org/en/title/1222828730
page 307 (posted 2019-11-05):
"Remembered"/"forgotten": the terms are so binary! What name shall we give these little elephants of mental life, these traces of perception that are present but not present, noticed but not noticed? ... They are like letters received but not yet opened, their content available to the invisible weaver of dreams because never exposed to the domesticating force of habitual thought.
page 3 (added 2023-08-28):
Many years ago, reading about the old oral cultures where wisdom and history lived not in books but on the tongue. I found my curiosity aroused by one brief remark. "Oral societies," I read, keep themselves "in equilibrium ... by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance."