"Forgetfulness" by Billy Collins (poetry reading)

For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing anxious being e'er resign'd,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing lingering look behind?
(Thomas Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard")

This kind of forgetfulness is for things that we have no essential reason to remember, mere bric-a-brac. When we check with younger people we find that they can't always remember the names of familiar movie stars either, which is a little reassuring.

The quadratic equation is - minus b plus or minus the square root of b squared minus four times a times c all over two times a - or I've forgotten it too.

What really scares us is another kind of memory loss. The time to worry is when we can't distinguish between peas, that we do like and carrots, that we don't. Or end up in the wrong part of town because we moved house twenty years ago. Or can't remember our daughter's birthday; also, now we come to think of it and no matter how hard we try, her name and her face too.

Worse still are the things we would like to forget, but can't. These unwelcome thoughts leap unbidden into our consciousness as we wake up in the mornings. They come rushing back to blight every spring day: those peccadillos from the past which still make us wince even though the witnesses are long departed or dead. Like the Hemingway character who had a shameful memory that he could not erase about the day he went to the races with his fly buttons undone.

Recently there have been newpaper headlines about a pill that erases unhappy memories. Perhaps they should call it Lethe (pronounced lee-th-ee) after that dark mythological river that begins with an L - or Nepenthe.

It's actually called Propanolol and it doesn't really erase memories like the newspapers say - but when did they ever tell us the unvarnished truth? - it allegedly disassociates unpleasant emotions.

That's the ideal solution to the problems of Hemingway's character, the psychiatrists' couch in a tablet form, that really works and doesn't turn them into a wrack, a wraith, a wreck or a "confessional poet".
http://www.scienceinafrica.co.za/2008...

"Dante submerged in the River Lethe" was by Paul Gustave Doré (1880).

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Forgetfulness
• Billy
• Collins

[Dapperdan2009]

I really enjoyed your reading. So different than hearing Collins read it. But I enjoyed your side of the story as well. I find it interesting that one of the other people who commented remarked that the poem was 'a little disturbing'. Which I find interesting, since someone who knew Collins' work and voice would have been very unlikely to say such a thing.

[athenaatalanta]

fave poem of his

[audiofile7]

Why take a pill? I believe Lacuna, Inc. provides that service.

[jmsimpson11]

brilliant. the loss of memory is so tied to a loss of identity.

[sleepingTitania]

Wonderful reading of this enjoyable (if a little disturbing... what's the author's name again...?) poem. Your commentary is terrific as well. Thankyou!