From Synthesizing Gravity, a collection of essays, which will be published this month by Grove Press.

It is easy to be sentimental about memory because of its powers to intensify. If something is remembered, it has been selected by the mind out of an almost infinite pool of things that might have been remembered but weren’t. The thing remembered thus becomes important simply because it has been remembered. How interesting is that? Who’s to say that the unremembered silver fruit knife situated just behind the remembered peach wouldn’t have been the better thing to have retained? This of course…