In Search of Lost Time

In an interview on Memory and the Digital Age

Your last book is In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.

This is Marcel Proust’s famous masterpiece which is an excruciatingly detailed chronicle of his life in which every single element and thought is captured and retold. Proust’s book is one of an entire (and well-known) genre: James Joyce’s Ulysses being one and Robert Musil’s A Man without Qualities a further one. 

These authors aim to capture the entirety of our being and it creates a fascinating and excruciating rollercoaster experience for the reader. Our minds capture a myriad of impressions every minute, but we deal with that deluge of stimuli by forgetting most of them. If one undoes that, like Marcel Proust, one will experience a very acute sense of overload.

With the exception of The Woman Who Can’t forget and Daniel Schacter’s scientific analysis, my choices are works of literature. They envision a dystopian world in which we remember too much. Schacter points at cognitive reasons as to why perfect recall is problematic. The woman who cannot forget is suffering in real life what the other authors wrote about. 

But she may not be alone for much longer. The digital tools around us make it very hard for us to forget and very easy for us to remember. So we might end up being the Funes of the future in an unforgetting, and thus unforgiving, world that is permanently tethering us to the past, inhibiting our ability to act in time.