History & Memory

"Historical memory allows us to forget about remembering and forget about forgetting, and thus, to remember."


In my opinion, history is a merge of the personal and the universal thats looked at differently by each of us. It goes without saying that when we tell a story, we are narrating what we had experienced out of the evidence we got. In the article, there was this one point when Nora was pointing out the difference between History and Memory, that History is universal and Memory is personal- agreed, but only on a level that doesnt justify what history REALLY is. History and Memory play their roles together but can never be the same.
When you recall or rethink about an event, you are creating a story. Similarly, when a historian "rethinks", he creates a story, he is interpreting transmitted information in a way that the current generation will probably understand. Without memory, the historian or the story teller, will find it difficult to actually locate specific information in order to create a fact.
The past is nothing but the memory of the past, and as such constitutes the very tissue of history. I agree with this comment 'cause in my opinion history doesnt work alone even as just a topic of discussion. Memory has a good amount of past events out of which a large chunk of raw, uncut information is scooped out and edited into history. Be it personal or universal, its all the same. Memory is not constant, it keeps changing over a period of time, thats how people tend to forget about things that might have been important but gradually turned into information thats forgotten and probably wont be revisited again.
When we talk about historical memory, only certain events can be actually remembered 'cause, there is too much to remember for a story thats got to be to the point, and the other reason could be that whatever had happened was not worth remembering. As Gadamer puts it ," Only by forgetting does the mind have the possibility to total renewal, the capacity to see everything with fresh eyes, so that what is long familiar fuses with the new into a many leveled unity." Its almost like telling a new story of the same past in a different way. Just like being creative.