"The Power of Forgetting"

I’m reading this collection of essays about Shakespeare’s plays, called “Shakespeare After All,” and in the “Hamlet” essay, the author, Marjorie Garber, says something that made me think of “Maus” and how its various survivors, including Art, were able to function after such tragedy. Any thoughts on this?

Friedrich Nietzsche saw memory as that which distinguishes human beings from animals. Cattle forget, and so they are happy. Humans remember, and so they suffer. “In the smallest and greatest happiness,” he wrote in his essay on history, “there is always one thing that makes it happiness: the power of forgetting.” Human beings, both individually and as a people, “must know the right time to forget as well as the right time to remember.” And in the same essay Nietzsche also wrote, with a glance, unmistakably at “Hamlet,” that the past has to be forgotten “if it is not to become the gravedigger of the present.”

(The Nietzsche essay she refers to is “The Use and Abuse of History”)

Amy's Pick

I should have picked this two weeks ago. Sorry. The short time frame means you have been saved from several obscure picks I was considering. Instead Didion, a memoir of the year after her husband's death. Enjoy.