Author: Lewis Hyde
Format: Hardback, 144mm x 220mm, 521g, 384 pages
Published: Canongate Books, United Kingdom, 2019

We live in a culture that prizes memory – how much we can store, the quality of what’s preserved, how we might better document and retain the moments of our life while fighting off the nightmare of losing all that we have experienced. But what if forgetfulness were seen not as something to fear, but rather as a blessing, a balm, a path to peace and forgiveness?

A Primer for Forgetting is a remarkable experiment in scholarship, autobiography and social criticism. It forges a new ‘history of forgetfulness’ by assembling fragments of art and writing from the ancient world to the modern, weighing the potential boons forgetfulness might offer the present moment as a philosophical and political force. It also turns inward, using the author’s own life and memory as a canvas upon which to extol the virtues of a concept too long taken as an evil.

Drawing material from Hesiod to Jorge Luis Borges to Elizabeth Bishop to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, from myths and legends to very real and recent traumas both personal and historical, A Primer for Forgetting is a unique and remarkable synthesis that only Lewis Hyde could have produced.

Lewis Hyde was born in Boston and studied at the Universities of Minnesota and Iowa. He is the author of The Gift and Trickster Makes This World. A MacArthur Fellow and former Director of Creative Writing at Harvard, Hyde is currently the Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College in Ohio. During the rest of the year he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is an Associate of Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Centre.

lewishyde.com

Author: Lewis Hyde

Number of Pages: 384

We live in a culture that prizes memory – how much we can store, the quality of what’s preserved, how we might better document and retain the moments of our life while fighting off the nightmare of losing all that we have experienced. But what if forgetfulness were seen not as something to fear, but rather as a blessing, a balm, a path to peace and forgiveness? A Primer for Forgetting is a remarkable experiment in scholarship, autobiography and social criticism. It forges a new ‘history of forgetfulness’ by assembling fragments of art and writing from the ancient world to the modern, weighing the potential boons forgetfulness might offer the present moment as a philosophical and political force. It also turns inward, using the author’s own life and memory as a canvas upon which to extol the virtues of a concept too long taken as an evil. Drawing material from Hesiod to Jorge Luis Borges to Elizabeth Bishop to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, from myths and legends to very real and recent traumas both personal and historical, A Primer for Forgetting is a unique and remarkable synthesis that only Lewis Hyde could have produced.