Memory
Strange how the mind can rummage through its drawers and pull up a memory with all its sense detail from the layers of things stored there. I suppose one day, soon, we'll know how this works. Perhaps we'll be able to erase things: exercise selective amnesia. Neuroscientists are already playing with such possibilities, at least in animals.
I've been reading a book by the (East) German writer, Christa Wolf. I didn't know her work until recently when a friend who lives in eastern France suggested I read her. The book I'm reading is City of Angels,about a year-long residency in Los Angeles, and her anxiety about collaboration with the East German police, an episode she had completely forgotten and which was widely publicised when the archives were opened after German reunification. I believe it is the last book published before her death in (I think) 2011, but a novella August has just been published, post-humously, by Seagull Books.