impressed........................

 

For practical purposes, the financial memory should be assumed to last, at a maximum, no more than 20 years.  This is normally the time it takes for the recollection of one disaster to be erased and for some variant of the previous dementia to come forward to capture the financial mind.  It is also the time generally required for a new generation to cone on the scene, impressed, as had been its predecessors, with its own financial genius.

-John Kenneth Galbraith, A Short History of Financial Euphoria

forgiving, forgetting, and responsibility...........

 

     Confusing forgiving with forgetting sets another trap: We become convinced that mistakes and wrongdoings not only can, but should, be forgotten.  Spiritual tradition sees it as a strange delusion that our problems have to be gotten rid of; instead, the sages and saints suggest, such difficulties are best put to use.  The offense is precisely what must not be forgotten, since it is through the act of facing what has happened and fitting it into a whole by re-membering it that the possibility of atonement (making at-one) occurs and forgiveness comes to fruition.  "Salvation lies in remembrance."

    And so, finally, because the past is important, there can be no "unconditional forgiveness."  Because we are human, and therefore limited, there can be no unconditional anything.  We are not God.  Forgetting that, as is our all-too-human tendency, we commit idolatry by assuming that since God loves and forgives unconditionally, we can be like God and do the same.  But all "idolatry" has ironic consequences, producing the opposite of the goal intended.  Thus the claim to "forgive unconditionally" is the antithesis of benign, for it devalues the one we are supposedly forgiving by implying that he is not responsible for his choices.

     Any understanding of forgiveness must include some notion of responsibility.  Forgiveness, divine or human, does not remove responsibility for our actions.  If we ignore the consequences of irresponsible actions by claiming or asking for unconditional forgiveness, then forgiveness loses its significance—it comes to be interpreted as not caring.  Every human being is responsible for his or her choices: which means, quite simply, that each of us has a need to matter—somehow, to someone.  We especially need to know that our actions have an effect on the people we love.

-Kurtz and Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

remembrance.................

30.  Look down from above on the numberless herds of mankind, with their mysterious ceremonies, their diverse voyagings in storm and calm, and all the chequered pattern of their comings and gatherings and goings.  Go on to consider the life of bygone generations; and then the life of all those who are yet to come; and even at the present day, the life of the hordes of far-off savages.  In short, reflect what multitudes there are who are ignorant of your very name; how many more will have speedily forgotten it; how many, perhaps praising you now, who will soon enough be abusing you; and that therefore remembrance, glory, and all else together are things of no worth. 

-Marcus Aurelius. Meditations, Book Nine

forgettery..........................

 

My 'forgettery' has been just as important to my success as my memory.

-attributed to Henry Miller

forgetting..............................

 

"We all want to dissolve," the old Zen monk in red bobble cap and thin glasses tells me, with a wry chuckle, as he greets me in the chill mountains behind Los Angeles, three hundred miles south of Big Sur, where I've come at the end of December.  "We all need the experience of forgetting who we are.  I think that's what love is: forgetting who you are."

     He flashes a crooked grin.  "Forgetting who you are is such a delicious experience.  And so frightening."

-Pico Iyer,  Aflame

Uh-oh........................

 Old men especially are dangerous, whose memory of things remains, but who have lost the memory of their repetitions.  I have seen some very amusing stories become very boring in the mouth of one nobleman, everyone present having been sated with them a hundred times.

-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book 1, Chapter 9

Today's American history lesson...............

      For the nation was then [1876], as it so often has been, at war with itself; in fact it was engaged in different wars simultaneously, each being waged on several fronts, wars that ran along the fault lines of modern America. . . .

     In the South, a far more important but equally savage war was being waged as white Democrats sought "redemption" from Reconstruction in anticipation of the presidential election.  Throughout the South "rifle clubs," "saber clubs," and "rifle teams" of former Confederates were being organized into infantry and cavalry units.  Already accounts of intimidation, beatings, whippings, and murder directed against Republicans and blacks had surfaced.  After the murder of three hundred black men in a single Mississippi county, one man, convinced that the words from the Democrat's own mouths would convince the world of their design, pleaded with the New York Times, "for God's sake publish the testimony of the Democrats before the Grand Jury."

      Voting returns had already begun to come in—there was no single national election day—and two months later Democrat Samuel Tilden would win the popular vote by a comfortable margin.  But he would never take office as president.  Instead the Republican secretary of war would threaten to "force a reversal" of the vote, federal troops with fixed bayonets would patrol Washington, and southerners would talk of reigniting the Civil War.  That crisis would ultimately be resolved through an extra-constitutional special committee and a political understanding:  Republicans would discard the voting returns of three states—Louisiana, Florida, South Carolina—and seize a single disputed electoral vote in Oregon to keep the presidency in the person of Rutherford B. Hayes.  But they also would withdraw all federal troops from the South and cease intervening in southern affairs, leaving the Negroes there to fend for themselves.

-John M. Barry, The Great Influenza