Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When you forget everything, there only remains yourself - and that is not enough.
This kind of forgetting does not erase memory, it lays the emotion surrounding the memory to rest.
Memory depends very much on the perspicuity, regularity, and order of our thoughts. Many complain of the want of memory, when the defect is in the judgment; and others, by grasping at all, retain nothing.
Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!
There is nothing on earth so easy as to forget, if a person chooses to set about it. I'm sure I have as much forgot your poor, dear uncle, as if he had never existed; and I thought it my duty to do so.
It's so necessary to try and record the cultural memory of people. To set it down for generations to come. To better understand where we are headed. The problem is, a good portion of what we choose to remember is about willed forgetting. Which we all do, I believe, to protect ourselves from what is too difficult.
I don't think forgetting is an important feature of human memory. I think it's important to be able to remember things accurately.
Memory is the thing you forget with.
To my mind, forgetting is a risky strategy for living. Memory is essential to us. It is DNA. We need to remember, and we need to imagine. That's why we have books, writing, fiction.
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.