Memory, for Sonnabend, was an illusion. Forgetting, not remembering,
was the inevitable outcome of all experience. From this perspective,
as he explained in the introduction to his turgid masterwork, "We,
amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally fleeting present, have
created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer
ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible pasage
of time and irretrievability of its moments and events" (p.16)
-- Lawrence Weschler. Mr. Wilson's Cabinet
of Wonder, New York: 1995. p.6
...it's actually quite marvelous, recounting as it does the story of a
pair of lovers who seduce each other one evening and the next morning
the woman has completely forgotten that they ever met and they have to
seduce each other all over again that night, and so on and so forth,
night after night thereafter ...
-- Lawrence Weschler, "Love Story." Article about
the novel, "Un cosi bel posto," by Fabrizio Rondolino, based on
characters Geoffrey Sonnabend and Madelena Delani in Weschler's
book, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (1995), which is based on the
Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles Times Book Review 2/4/2001, p9