On non-forgetting...........

 

The lesson is this: the greatest part of humanity is always at risk of forgetting the best of its inheritance. Only a sustained and practiced art of memory prevents this from happening. And that is the responsibility we can’t fail to choose, if we want to keep the world from losing itself in forgetting. If we genuinely wish to see art in our own lifetimes that is really worthy of our history, then we can’t afford to pretend it isn’t immensely difficult—perhaps harder than ever—to make something truly new. But we cannot stop at anxiety. Only by going through anxiety, only by naming it, learning from it, and letting it pass into and out of us, can we survive the crushing pressure of our own traditions.

-Sam Jennings, from this essay on Harold Bloom and our literary inheritance

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