Memories kept as possessions fade, while protected ones remain alive and vulnerable

Evidence

Memories cannot be conserved in drawers and pigeon-holes; in them the past is indissolubly woven into the present. No-one has them at his disposal in the free and voluntary way that is praised in Jean Paul’s fulsome sentences. Precisely where they become controllable and objectified, where the subject believes himself entirely sure of them, memories fade like delicate wallpapers in bright sunlight. But where, protected by oblivion, they keep their strength, they are endangered like all that is alive. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 179

Categorization

• XREF: Directly engages Proust’s involuntary memory and Bergson; the reader’s prior highlights on involuntary remembrance vs. voluntary control resonate here. — connects to: Deferred mourning is stored up and complicates later griefs — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 307; Memory poetically completes the past self with a plenitude of being
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that memory is only preserved by the oblivion that also endangers it — a genuinely dialectical, difficult point about recollection.

Broader Connections

• Memory poetically completes the past self with a plenitude of being #contradicts (0.75)
• Deferred mourning is stored up and complicates later griefs #expands (0.70) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 307