As we get older, we get forgetful. This is familiar to us all, old or young, firsthand or secondhand. It becomes harder and harder to remember names and words, often embarrassingly, in the middle of a conversation. It is also well known that matters of immediate past are more easily and quickly forgotten whereas matters from our remote past remain intact and often vivid. Of late, approaching 86, I am experiencing forgetfulness on still another level.
I forget what I had forgotten. It is not failing to remember what it was that I had forgotten; it is obvious that what had been forgotten could not be remembered because it had been forgotten. It is failing to remember, not what it was that had been forgotten, but the fact that I had tried to remember something but could not. For example, I stop washing the dishes, dry my hands and walk to the computer to look up something, knowing that I would not remember if I had waited until I finished the dishes, but, reading the computer, I don’t remember what it was I was going to look up. Later, settling down at the computer, I have no memory of the earlier effort to look up something, not even its urgency.
When I think of looking up something, which happened possibly by chance what I had tried earlier to look up, I should remember that it was what I had earlier tried to remember to look up but had forgotten, but I don’t. I had totally forgotten that I had already forgotten before. This is forgetting the forgotten. It should annoy me; but, curiously, or rather obviously, it doesn’t. Forgetfulness is a bliss. I have a glimpse that dementia, in every point of progress, may well be liberating.
12.31.18
