David Brooks on The Bad Memory Century
Friday, April 11, 2008 at 01:56PM This is one of the funniest (and most truthful) columns I've read in a long time:
April 11, 2008 New York Time Op-Ed Columnist, David Brooks on The Great Forgetting. Excerpt:
... Some vaguely familiar person will come up to you in the supermarket. “Stan, it’s so nice to see you!” The smug memory dropper can smell your nominal aphasia and is going to keep first-naming you until you are crushed into submission.
Your response here is critical. You want to open up with an effusive burst of insincere emotional warmth: “Hey!” You’re practically exploding with feigned ecstasy. “Wonderful to see you too! How is everything?” All the while, you are frantically whirring through your memory banks trying to anchor this person in some time and context.
A decent human being would sense your distress and give you some lagniappe of information — a mention of the church picnic you both attended, the parents’ association at school, the fact that the two of you were formerly married. But the Proustian bully will give you nothing. “I’m good. And you?” It’s like trying to get an arms control concession out of Leonid Brezhnev.
Your only strategy is evasive vagueness, conversational rope-a-dope until you can figure out who this person is. You start talking in the tone of over-generalized blandness that suggests you have recently emerged from a coma.
Sensing your pain, your enemy pours it on mercilessly. “And how is Mary, and little Steven and Rob?” People who needlessly display their knowledge of your kids’ names are the lowest scum of the earth.
You’re in agony now, praying for an episode of spontaneous combustion. But still she drives the blade in deeper, “That was some party the other night wasn’t it?”
You lose vision. What party? Did you see this person at a party? By now, articulation is impossible. You are a puddle of gurgling noises and awkward silences. After the longest of these pauses, she goes for the coup de grâce: “You have no idea who I am, do you?”
You can’t tell the truth. That would be an admission of social defeat. The only possible response is: “Of course, I know who you are. You’re the hooker who hangs around on 14th Street most Saturday nights.”
Been there... Have you?
Humor 
Reader Comments (2)
I am so bad about this! I'm especially horrible about remembering names of people whom I met as a child or teen. But apparently, my appearance has changed so little that folks who went to church with our family when I was 8-10 can still pick me out of a crowd... and they do!
I sorta suspect that the Googlization of our society is only gonna exacerbate this problem. I don't really hafta remember stuff as long as I have Google (and Google Desktop, locally) to be my memory.
Hi Rob,
I am the same way about remembering people from my childhood. What makes it worse is that my sister remembers EVERYBODY!
We've all turned our need to remember over to devices. We just have to remember the passwords to them.
Doug