A Few Useful Memento Sources
Note: plot spoilers abound, so do yourself a favor: don't look at any of these until you've watched the film! Half the fun of a mystery is being tricked!!
Please send me any useful sources others may appreciate, and I'll post them as well.
A surprisingly well done exposition on Tumblr (yes, I'm using Tumblr in my notes!)
Something worth considering, especially in both Existential and Postmodern context.
Nietzsche On Memory, Identity, Choice and Action:
Discussing Nietzsche’s “On the Advantages and
Disadvantages of History for Life” the second of four essays in
Untimely Meditations (1874):
Although Nietzsche describes several different symptoms of
this sickness in the course of his text, he initially makes this latter point by
comparing the life of a culture or people to that of an individual: the vitality
and vigour of a culture requires a limitation of the range of its historical
knowledge, just as the moments of happiness or the moments of decision and
action in our personal lives require us to live fully in the present, limiting
our recollection of the past; by, in other words, forgetting the past. Without
some such forgetting – which is always prior to the possibility of actively
remembering something and reflecting on it – we would, of course, become
self-conscious to the point of distraction and alienation. If there is a
historical malady in modern European culture, then, it would seem that the cure
to the sickness lies in finding the right balance, for the sake of our lives,
between an excess of historical knowledge or remembering and an excess of
forgetting; between living in the manner of someone unable even to lift a finger
because, remembering everything, he sees only becoming in things, only the
transitory nature of events, and living in the ignorance – however blissful it
may be to forget everything as soon as it happens – of a cow or goldfish. The
ability to find this balance is what Nietzsche terms the ‘plastic power’3 of an
individual or people.
-- Mark Sinclair, “Nietzsche
and the Problem of History”, Richmond Journal of Philosophy 8 (Winter 2004)
“Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know what is
meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about
again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment
and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. This is
a hard sight for man to see; for, though he thinks himself better than the
animals because he is human, he cannot help envying them their happiness – what
they have, a life neither bored nor painful, is precisely what he wants, yet he
cannot have it because he refuses to be like an animal…
[Man] also wonders at himself, that he cannot learn to
forget but clings relentlessly to the past: however far and fast he may run,
this chain runs with him. And it is a matter for wonder: a moment, now here and
then gone, nothing before it came, again nothing after it has gone, nonetheless
returns as a ghost and disturbs the peace of a later moment. A leaf flutters
from the scroll of time, floats away – and suddenly floats back again and falls
into the man’s lap. Then the man says ‘I remember’ and envies the animal, who at
once forgets and for whom every moment really dies, sinks back into night and
fog and is extinguished forever.”
― Friedrich
Nietzsche, Untimely
Meditations