Hiroshima Mon Amour, Part 5

Fifth, memory is forgetting.  We must do justice to the past, to the horror of the catastrophe of Hiroshima, through remembering it.  We cannot forget Hiroshima.  But the horrible yet beautiful thing about Hiroshima, she remarks, is that Hiroshima will happen again.  Life returns to Hiroshima, reconstruction must take place.  The love lost in Hiroshima, for the sake of love, which must be remembered, must be forgotten.  Love requires both memory and forgetting.  It requires forgetting in its future and remembering in its past.  Love is only memory so long as life is eternal and the objects of love are infinite.  But outside this orbit, love cannot last, because it must end, and because it must be forgotten, so that memory again can occur.  We must forget in order that we are able to remember.  

Apart from the requirements of love, memory is forgetting insofar as it is a representation separated from the truth.  Memory is finite, limited, it is this memory or that memory.  Even the memories of films and language are not eternal and are not all-enveloping.  All of the technical means we have towards memory lose some part of experience and in this loss and substitution with the memory, we have forgotten part of the original experience.