ما يُنسى يبدو كأنّه لم يحدُث قط .

If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.

If you didn't remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn't?

[M]ost of what happens actually is forgotten.

Just as real events are forgotten, some that never were can be in our memories as if they happened.

There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.

All the images and impressions and countries and continents he'd vised had been erased. What you don't remember never happened.

But how can we forget what we never knew?

There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken of or written of, though it would be wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.

What I forget not only ceases to exist, but never really existed in the first place.

The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened.

The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten. In times when history still moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted backdrop for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves at a brisk clip. A historical event, though soon forgotten, sparkles the morning after with the dew of novelty. No longer a backdrop, it is now the adventure itself, an adventure enacted before the backdrop of the commonly accepted banality of private life.

Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through is now like something from the distant past. We’re so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about everyday, too many new things we have to learn. But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone.

You can’t remember what you never forgot.