Quote of the Day (Thomas Mann, on Space, Time, and Forgetfulness)

“Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state. Yes, it can even, in the twinkling of an eye, make something like a vagabond of the pedant and Philistine. Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.”—German novelist and Nobel Literature laureate Thomas Mann (1875-1955), The Magic Mountain, translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter (1924)

Quote of the Day (Joe Queenan, With the Excuses We Need for Not Recalling a Name)

“When the likable chap at the PTA meeting first introduced himself in 1994, you did not realize that you would keep bumping into him for the next 27 years. So you didn't commit his name to memory. Also, there was a lot of noise in the room that day. And you'd just had a root canal. As the years passed, it only became more embarrassing to say, ‘I'm sorry, but I'm not sure I ever caught your name.’”—Columnist Joe Queenan, “The Rising Shame of Not Knowing a Name,” The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 11-12, 2021

No wonder that more than a few of us baby boomers would support Queenan’s proposal for a National Amnesty Day, “where it is permissible to go out and ask people their names, without fear or embarrassment, even  if you have known the person in question since the Pirates won the World Series.”