I was just watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind the other night and it reminded me of how I wanted to erase the memory of someone from my life. I realized at that point that I have indeed started to forget about him because the movie "had" to remind about forgetting him. Get my point?
As hard it is to forget someone or something is to remember things that we are expected to know. It's a mark of one's being cultured, I suppose, that we can remember the poem where the "eternal sunshine..." line came from or even easily recognize that it is indeed a poem and not something that some brilliant kid from Hollywood came up with.
Now, scientists from Cornell have supposedly come up with the formula for memorability and, according to The Economist, they are not enlisting Shakespeare or the "eternal sunshine..." poet (it's Alexander Pope, by the way. Thank you, Google!) for help, but rather from...Hollywood.
"Hollywood provides many of the set phrases we deploy in everyday life," says The Economist. "Whether at the bar or in the boardroom, movies permeate our language. Cultural osmosis means that this source material is oft-quoted both consciously and unconsciously."
As for me, I think in remembering that I needed to forget that someone, I have actually remembered him. Indeed, "how happy is the blameless vestal's lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot."
