My mind's a blank/book This week I’ve read two similar articles from different newspapers about how we tend to forget about what we read. Oddly enough, I had a vague feeling that I had read something similar to it and I just couldn’t remember where. Although an interesting reading, there was nothing new to see: yes, we tend to remember more the moment when we were reading this or that book than the book’s plot itself; no, we can’t expect to memorize everything, especially those things we just read once; and yes, the internet is changing how our memory decides what is important to remember and what is not. However, I felt that all these articles forgot to mention an aspect related to the topic: the time for reading. If there are many books that we’ve read and they’re not quite fresh in our heads to the point of easily quoting them, it’s because we’re often reading new things. How can we keep reading the same books over and over, as there is a wide unknown sea to venture in, right? Of course, I acknowledge that there are people who might stick for a small number of readings throughout their lives with a sort of emotional attachment as the fuel to countless rereadings of the same books. But discovering new things to read is addicting. Well, reading is addicting. A “solitary vice” as many authors have pointed out. Intertextuality allows that we never reach a dead-end: to read a book is always to read many others and follow Ariadne’s thread not to outside the labyrinth, but deeper within it. And so we hoard books. Reading them just one time to catch the next – and sometimes not even that. Only if what Schopenhauer said about buying books and the time to read them was indeed what happens! We tend to forget not only because we rely on Google to remember us where we can find that quote we once saw (and extinguish that phantasmagoric feeling of “I did read about this somewhere. Did I?” that would otherwise disturb our sanity), but also because we’re too eager to jump into the next one without properly absorbing the previous. Memory does not go hand in hand only with repetition, but with attention as well. But I don’t praise the future possibility that we should read like the bicentennial man or to download books directly in our brains to never forget again. There’s fun in forgetting but then remembering once again. These blanks are what makes us go back and revisit the memories that would otherwise probably fall into oblivion. Free tickets to the nostalgia train!