Find A Primer For Forgetting: Getting Past The Past Generated By Lewis Hyde Offered In Volume

is an important book for many reasons, and at times, magical, That said, not everyone will have the patience for its journallike construction, and be open enough to the deep currents Hyde is tapping into, The book is built of notes, generated by quotations he has come across in his voluminous reading of the canon of western literature from Plato to Proust.
These pagelength microessays are grouped intoormain chapters, the first of which is Myth, So its the topic of Forgetting in the context of our most ancient myths, This works out to be a fascinating set of meditations on what happens when we die and what the process of forgetting is before we come back again great stuff.
The more timely part is about the role of amnesia including legislated amnesia encoded in laws in healing social and political wounds, Given the bleeding carwreck that is America today, these examples, drawn from ancient Greece to apartheid South Africa, are thoughtprovoking, at the least, and deeply optimistic at their best.
Asa I said, the format is by nature a bit meandering, but in a good way, like a creek on hot summer day, moving slowly, but inexorably, toward to larger summation.
Embodying a collage form of the personal essay, Hyde uses A Primer for Forgetting to interrogate how forgetfulness permeates throughout human societies, though his focus primarily centers on American experiences.
A Primer for Forgetting extols forgetfulness as a means for cultivating peace and encouraging growth, but this book also complicates this notion further by contrasting positive forms of forgetfulness with the kinds of erasure that normalize systematic oppressions in everyday societies.
Hyde's form enables him to adopt a sophistic approach to the subjectand the incorporation of lived histories from Hyde's own involvement in the Civil Rights movement helps counterbalance some elements of this text that might lend itself to advocating a postracial ideological stance.
However, as fascinating as Hyde's approach is here, the academic in me questions whether there is an inherent danger to approaching a bricolage without a clear thesis.
Regardless of intent, Hyde's decision to not include a thesis in A Primer for Forgetting enables readers to draw problematic ideological conclusions from this book, such as erasing trauma in the historical record is a justifiable act.
A Primer for Forgetting is a fine, thoughtprovoking book whose greatest faults stem from its creative form, fascinating Lewis Hyde essayist, poet, and author of most notably Trickster Makes This World and The Gift produces as a change of pace "a thought experiment" on the needfulness of forgetting.
Although he does not express it outright, the reader is left with the sense that this project was provoked by his experience of his mother's dementia and the struggle many children go through to lift the condition into meaning the irony of attempting to locate reason upon its rather crafty escape.


Resembling a notebook filled with random thought, Hyde sets out to make the case for the importance of memory's loss how certain amnesias strengthen focus, assist in the survival of severe trauma, and provide in selected instances the only road to forgiveness.
The material is highlyreferenced and draws deep from several wells, among which include the Greeks, the Arabs, Buddhism, Emerson, Pierre Janet, Nabokov, Proust, and historical incident chiefly racial violence in the South the Civil Rights Era and the West the Sand Creek Massacre.
Brief mention is made of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but I didn't feel he'd finished processing this,

In fact, I feel the work loses its way at the midpoint, perhaps embracing this necessity of forgetting to the degree that its author instinctively misplaces the coordinates of his journey.
We reach a juncture in the closing pages of his section on Creation that concludes: Writing damages forgetfulness and so, perhaps, he is bowing to newlyfound truths that change his course and completely lift him off the page.
It may be that he is choosing to forget not only his aim, but his book, . . and then his reader as well, One cannot know.

I may not be ready to forget quite this much,

I bought this book largely because I loved The Gift, The style here is quite differentmore of a collage but not bothersome to me anyway as Ive read some suggest,
Still, Im not convinced by the central thesis regarding the importance of forgetting, Certainly Hyde has a nuanced and more complex approach to thisnot suggesting precisely that one just erase traumatic history, Nonetheless, it made me uncomfortable in the context of what I see as the importance of bearing witness, I understand his argument about the nature of healing, But, Im of two, maybe three minds Perhaps before I was of just one, And Hyde has given me more to think about, This was one of the most intellectually stimulating books I've read in a long while it put me back in the days when I was a philosophy student, thinking always about big, overarching, challenging ideas.
Lewis Hyde, I learned, is among other things a poet, and this is evident in the mode in which the book is written: short "essays" anywhere from a third of a page to six pages the book, and thus the pages, are small clustered together in sections titled Myth, Self, Nation and Creation my favorite.
They are not so much essays as ruminations on forgetting and the role it has played or plays in each of these arenas, But they are not really just ruminations

either, because Hyde has obviously done a lot of research to support his thinkingeither that or he's really knowledgeable, So, what you have here is philosophical/poetical thought clusters all related to each other by the theme of forgetting, Hyde is neither for nor against forgetting he simply shares thoughts and information on the role of forgetting in history, creativity, and personal/psychological experience, In the Nation section, Hyde explores whether forgetting has a beneficial role to play in the cases of US lynchings, the Holocaust and the treatment of Native Americans and, if so, what shape that takes.
Personally, I have lately been thinking about the meaning of the oftmaligned nostalgia and sentimentality, As I approach my mid's, I realize that the value to me of memories rooted in my past is that they are integrative, gathering back up into the folds of my skirt past experiences that have fallen away and become lost and hidden and giving me a feeling of my whole self, over time, suddenly reintegrated and restored, if only for a moment.
Hyde spends several pages writing about Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, which I only struggled through in French I think I might get a lot out of reading it again, this time in English and with overyears more of life experience under my belt.
Finally, I also personally connected to Hyde's sad, brief references to his mother's dementia, which were very thinly sprinkled throughout the book, I got the feeling that their minimization reflected how painful it is for Hyde to recall these incidents and how frightened he is to think that he might be facing the same fate.
A Primer for Forgetting has a lot to offer both your head and your heart, .