through journals and blogs, through which emails you save and delete
Nixon wanted to have documentation of his presidency so recorded everything on tape systems he set up throughout the White House and elsewhere. When these were subpoenaed for the Watergate hearings, parts of these tapes were mysteriously erased.
journalists’ notes–in a personal language only they can read
Google saves all our emails–we don’t have to see them, but it’s a history we can’t edit
notes toward a reconstruction (keeping travel notes, and writing the story of the trip later); what we keep in is what we remember, everything else fades away; photos too
all the details that combine to make a life; how that story is told later; edited and unedited history
“One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that Daniel Webster got drunk but only remember that he was a splendid constitutional lawyer. We must forget that George Washington was a slave owner…and simply remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.” W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction
“Her project [Tamina’s of Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Kundera] like Don Quixote’s, is predicated on an ingenuous belief that words and images in the mind possess the power to resurrect the past.” Maria N. Banerjee, Terminal Paradox; Hana Pichova, The Art of Memory in Exile, 2002