Generally, our culture takes a very positive view of memories and the act of remembering: we esteem the study of history, we are expected to take photos to capture precious moments; we think that old injustices should be made good in the present; we promise not to forget old acquaintances or family from a long time ago. I find that furniture carries with it many memories and even energies from times past and people past (or passed).
But without denying the value of any of this, it pays to honour the idea that in order to survive in the here and now, we actively also need to do something else: forget. Certain memories threaten to destroy the future – and our capacity to exist. If we held onto everything that had ever happened to us in all the technicolor vividness of the original event, we’d be overburdened with anxiety and sadness, we’d be continuously terrified and consumed with regret: we’d be driven to despair by all the meanness we’d encountered, all the stupidity we’d been guilty of and all the beauty and goodness we had lost.
To have a poor memory belongs, in many contexts, to survival. In the 1870s, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche circled this theme in an essay called The Uses and Abuses of History for Life. Though Nietzsche was himself a brilliant historian and hugely aware of political and social history, he also came to recognise that forgetting was essential to a capacity to thrive, at both an individual and collective level. As he put it: There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of the historical sense, through which living comes to harm and finally is destroyed, whether it is a person or a people or a culture.
Nietzsche attributed the vigour and natural stoicism of animals to their ignorance of the past. If a cow knew all that had happened to her forebears, her life would feel impossible, the philosopher speculated. Analogously, he proposed that children can be moving to us precisely because they aren’t burdened by the memories and regrets that start to dampen the spirits of anyone past the age of twenty-five; nothing much has yet happened to the very young and, therefore, so much more seems possible.
Nietzsche was approaching a radical but properly constructive question: what’s the point of thinking about the past? His answer was precise: we should remember only in so far as it actually helps us to live in the present. To the extent that memories assist us in forming our plans and avoiding error, they are valuable, but when memories function as obstacles to better lives, we should put our energies into the business of forgetting.
The best way to forget is not just time, but – more exactly – events. So as to separate ourselves from the things that haunt us, we have to ensure that we can lay down a dense layer of events between us and they; we need – in short – to make stuff happen.
This is particularly true when the stories relate to times of war or conflict, when certain places, times of day and activities remain tightly linked to the past and constantly evoke it painfully. Sometimes those lovely pieces of furniture may carry with them a story of being confiscated by Nazi’s during the war or the subject of a serious conflict upon the breakdown of a marriage, or perhaps even associated with the loss of a deeply loved partner or parent.
We’re surrounded by emotional tripwires. Our heart breaks again and again. We cannot, as we might at points want, get rid of the world in which the past once played itself out. We can’t burn the cushions or destroy the dining suite as a means of hiding from the past. To forget, we have to impose a new layer of experience on the things we associate with lost love. We should take a fresh new approach to our beautiful furniture by bringing beautiful experiences from today to these pieces. We have to reclaim the material of our life from the tragedies of the past and install a much happier present while treasuring the best from the past. With a new commitment to forgetting, we should recover some of the hope of the innocence of a child’s outlook and the fortitude of a cow blissfully grazing in the paddock.
Bring the best of the old into today.
