Transience and futility are the twin sisters of forgetting

From Amazon.de, I received with great glee In the mail last Friday, the latest from my favorite author, Christa Wolf. She is a German author with a fascinating biography. She writes like no one else in this world. She bends words to their limits, always thinking, always studying the origins of human nature, good and bad, and our use of language to express ourselves.

The book I started reading today is called "Ein Tag im Jahr 1960-2000" (One Day of the Year). Here is the background:

In 1935, author Maxim Gorki called upon authors of the world to document" a day of the world". This was apparently not taken seriously until 1960, when the newspaper Iswestija (a newspaper out of Moscow) printed the idea that everyone should describe the 27th of September of that year "as close as possible". The idea struck a chord with Christa Wolf, and she made a journal of that day as suggested, and she kept going, recording every September 27th for the next 40 years. She published this journal in April of 2003.

The book opens with a forward about why she felt the need to keep the journal and why she published it. In a nutshell, she says that she kept the journal to have a reliable document of at least ONE day of each year of her life. We are so busy living our lives, growing, and developing as people, that it is almost impossible to remember everything. Then she comes up with this: "Transience and Futility are the twin sisters of Forgetting" (my translation of "Vergaenglichkeit und Vergeblichkeit [sind die] Zwillingsschwestern des Vergessens" . ) Pretty deep, isn't it? The phrase hasn't left my mind since I read it this morning on the way to work.

When I hold someone in such high esteem as I do this author, I often ask myself, "what would I ask this person if I ever had a chance to meet them"? I've never been able to think of a question for Mrs. Wolf, because I've always been in complete awe of her. I've finally come up with a question. I'd ask her if, with this idea, she was implying that personal growth would be impossible without the act of forgetting. I always put such stress on learning and experiencing for growth -- but I never considered that at some point in the synthesis of our activities we have to cast things aside to streamline the process. Of course we can't remember everything - we'd never have the energy to do anything at all if we spent it all on remembering. That process of attrition must be very exciting for psychiatrists, neurosurgeons, and sociologists, because it is largely, I imagine, unconscious.