... idiosyncratic and brilliant ... To live in time is to live in a realm of forgetfulness — and that, Hyde argues, is a good thing. If we remembered all of the thoughts we think and the experiences we have, we’d live in chaos ... It’s an experiment in thought because it subverts our tendency to associate memory with discipline and intelligence, forgetfulness with distraction and infirmity ... Over the years, Hyde has collected samples — from poems and philosophical treatises and psychological studies and art exhibits — that speak to forgetting, and he shapes his intentionally scattershot book around these selections and his brief responses to them ... Does he contradict himself? Very well then he contradicts himself. After all, contradicting oneself comes from forgetting oneself, and forgetting oneself can lead to new life ... Hyde makes us forget what we thought we knew about forgetfulness — and, in doing so, he makes us know forgetfulness for the first time.
Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting is like this: koans, digressions, clipped asides, a history of forgetting that forgets to be a book and is instead islands of text, a breezy archipelago ... Primer is by no means light. It’s a beautiful book that leaves most of the work to you. But that work doesn’t feel like work, it’s not a puzzle to be solved. It’s less Cy Twombly, more James Turrell ... The most beautiful passages here reflect on Hyde’s mother in the last years of her life battling dementia. As she forgets, you might say that we see dementia defeat her. But lovingly Hyde questions our assumption that dementia 'defeats' ... Hyde, at 74, has penned a poignant goodbye to language, accomplishment, memory, and pride; he guides us to the end of information, which is gratitude for the amusing pastime of learning then a surrender to nothing.
Lewis Hyde’s new book is so counterintuitive, so bracingly clear and fresh, that reading it is like leaping into a cold lake on a hot hike. It shocks the mind. It flushes all kinds of monotony and mental fatigue right out of your system. I have filled a notebook with things from this book I am determined to remember, which is quite a paradox, given that it’s a book about forgetting ... A Primer for Forgetting constantly weaves and unweaves its own realizations. It is less argument than art ... Early in this wondrous book [Hyde] quotes a letter from the poet Elizabeth Bishop, who is writing partly in praise of the attentive oblivion necessary for any great creative accomplishment (she is reading Charles Darwin) and partly in praise of the Oblivion that the right attention enables: 'What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.' That would be an apt description of this entire book. I can’t tell you how many times I put it down to stare out the window. I can think of no higher praise.
When you turn your attention to forgetting, does that mean you are in fact remembering? This question runs through Hyde’s beautiful prose like a bright red thread, or perhaps a string tied around your finger ... Hyde is no Nietzschean; he’s closer to Henry David Thoreau, who relished the sense of losing something instead of pounding his chest to insist that there was never anything to be lost. Thoreau, like Hyde, remembers forgetting, but he is consumed by neither memory nor loss. The last words of A Primer For Forgetting are 'teach me to disappear.' But there they are: words visible on the page—the trace of a lesson.
You should buy it and read it as soon as you’ve got a chance. Hyde’s one of the few authors I know of whose work, even if you disagree with it, leaves your mind almost thrummingly alive. Split into four sections — Myth, Self, Nation, Creation — A Primer for Forgetting is a welcome tonic and corrective to the current age of overwhelming data, constant news and infinite tips to keep your brain sharp ... Hyde will shake how you think of things, but of course there’s a price. He is one of the best writers we’ve got going, if only for how seriously he takes his readers’ intelligence, how little he’s trying to pander. There’s no clear answer to how to get past the past, what details or abstractions to remember or let go of, and Hyde is not claiming there is. But if we ever — as individuals or a society — are going to find a way forward, I’m betting that Hyde’ll have something to do with it.
Hyde’s thesis—less a structured argument than an aggregation of loosely related anecdotes and observations, collected scrapbook-style—transcends simple polemic ... And alongside all of the bright-burning erudition, there is a very moving personal angle: his mother’s progressive dementia and the prospect of his own.
Hyde’s arguments are complicated, but one can think of them as stubborn refusals to take the established order for granted ... In A Primer for Forgetting, Hyde wants to trouble our notion of memory as always preferable to forgetfulness ... If we pitched Primer to TED Talk habitués, we could call it 'The Life-Changing Magic of Letting Things Go.' But Hyde could never give a TED Talk. He refuses to sand the edges or round off the corners of his ideas. And when he extends his thought experiment from the individual to the communal, or national, uses of forgetting, he confronts the limits of his approach ...the question arises: Are we forgetting the right things? Are there things we’re required to remember? ... Forgetting, it would seem, privileges the powerful.
In this delicate, allusive thought experiment, literary critic Hyde (The Gift) probes the idea of forgetting as a positive act ... Hyde draws on widely varied references, including Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, literary luminaries that include Nabokov and Borges ... An elegant exercise in philosophy and form, Hyde’s meditation on forgetting as an act of clarity offers stimulating contemplation of the odd paradox that 'memory and oblivion... cannot function unless they work together.'
Illustrated with artwork from an imaginary Museum of Forgetting, the author’s collage of entries comes from a rich trove of philosophy, mythology, ancient and modern literature, religion, psychology, art, and history as well as his own life, including witnessing his mother’s dementia ... Amnesia, nostalgia, forgiveness, retribution, and the mining of memory in psychoanalysis—Hyde considers all these and more. An eclectic and insightful miscellany of playful, spirited, provocative reflections.
