Japanese folding screen depicting a scene from the Tale of the Heike, seventeenth century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mary Griggs Burke Collection, gift of the Mary and Jackson Burke Foundation, 2015.

Memory

Volume XIII, Number 1 | winter 2020

Miscellany

“Memory,” wrote the novelist Jean Paul in 1816, “is the only paradise out of which we cannot be driven away.” Critical theorist Theodor Adorno disagreed with his assertion. “Memories cannot be conserved in drawers and pigeonholes,” he wrote in response. “Precisely where they become controllable and objectified, where the subject believes himself entirely sure of them, memories fade like delicate wallpapers in bright sunlight.”

History is a people’s memory, and without a memory man is demoted to the level of the lower animals.

—Malcolm X, 1964

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The Colosseum, attributed to Robert Eaton, c. 1855.
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DÉjÀ Vu

Monumental Mistakes

2023:

Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.

c. 1850:

Thompson of Sunderland makes his mark on Pompey’s pillar.

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