Ricoeur on remembering

REMEMBERING seems to be so natural to us, a part of the human endowment. It is because we remember that events “continue on.” Augustine referred to the “distentio animae”...the distention of the soul between retention and pro-tention, between remembering and portending.

Part of the mechanisms of intelligence is remembering; for while the capacity of computers to store infinitely more prodigious bytes of data surpasses the meager capacity of the human mind, only we have that combinatorial possibility of putting together data we remember — and data we remember are stored elsewhere — to arrive at groundbreaking conclusions.