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Quote by Elena Hartwell

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Three Strikes, You're Dead

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Elena Hartwell

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“Ricoeur describes forgetting as both an active and a passive act: the individual’s responsibility to keep the event remembered is just as important as the changing political environment that is beyond the individual’s control. Neglect, or an unwillingness to revisit the past, constitutes an active act of forgetting. The responsibility of the individual to give an account (or testimony) of a significant event, and the need to remember and mourn the past, form some of Ricoeur’s ethical concerns in Memory, History, Forgetting.”

“Forgetting is what nature does best. The universe is a huge forgetting machine. It erases information no matter how hard we try to hang onto it. How could it be any different? What if the memory of everything that ever happened still existed? The universe would be clogged with information, so packed with it we couldn’t move. We’d be paralyzed, because every moment we ever lived would still be with us. It would be hell.”

“Why is it important to forget? Forgetting plays a vital role in our ability to function for a deceptively simple reason. Forgetting allows us to prioritise. Anything irrelevant to our survival will take up wasteful cognitive space if we assign it the same priority as events critical to our survival.”