Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. Today: Imagine losing everything you own. That’s what happened to Meghan Daum, whose house burned down in the LA fires. How would you cope? In this stunning piece, Meghan shares her strategy: Forget as much as you can.
“Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.”
This is the salient line and central message of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” an essay that opens with a scene of a man standing before a large herd animal, envying its apparent happiness and asking why it merely gazes at him rather than sharing the secret to its happiness.
The beast wants to explain that it doesn’t offer an answer because it immediately forgets anything it has to say. But of course, this reply exits the beast’s mind as soon as it enters, so it remains silent, and the man is left wondering.
“But he also wonders about himself, that he is not able to learn to forget and that he always hangs onto past things,” Nietzsche writes. “No matter how far or how fast he runs, this chain runs with him.”
The essay, which was written in 1874 and appears as the first in Nietzsche’s seminal collection Untimely Meditations, critiqued what the author regarded as eroding intellectual and creative standards in Germany in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. The root causes of this mediocrity, he suggested, was a national fixation on the past that stifled imagination and trapped people in nostalgic grief. He suggested that humans take a lesson from animals and develop a capacity to live “unhistorically.”
The beast, he writes, “gets up in the present like a number without any odd fraction left over. . . . By contrast, the human being resists the large and ever increasing burden of the past, which pushes him down or bows him over. It makes his way difficult.”
Is this a fancy way of saying “live in the moment?” Perhaps it should be seen as an alternative to Kamala Harris’s “unburdened by what has been” locution—a serving of simple greens in place of her word salad, if you will.
