"Our daily encounters with forgetting have not taught us enough about how much power it exercises over our lives, what reflections and feelings it evokes in different individuals, how even art and science presuppose—with sympathy or antipathy—forgetting, and finally what political and cultural barriers can be erected against forgetting when it cannot be reconciled with what is right and moral. . . . We find that cultural history provides a helpful perspective in which the value of the art of forgetting emerges. . . . That is the subject this book (through which flows Lethe, the meandering stream of forgetfulness) will try to represent and discuss by means of many concrete examples, taken primarily from literature."—from Lethe Lethe is an exploration of the art of forgetting—as the counterpart of the rhetorical art of memory—in Western culture from the Greeks to the present. It offers penetrating analyses of works by, among others, Augustine, Bellow, Borges, Casanova, Celan,...