But, just as much, everyone lets him or herself be weighed down or filled with repressed, distasteful memories.
For anyone with distasteful memories of school lunches from the 1980s and 1990s, sitting down to lunch with the pupils and staff at the Reach academy in Feltham, west London, is eating in a different era.
The bewildering collapse of the great French Army, which folded within six weeks of the German advance in the spring of 1940; the alacrity with which many countries adapted to occupation; and the willingness to ignore, and sometimes to assist in, the deportations all made distasteful memories.
In seconds, the distasteful memories came flooding back.
To a small but vocal faction, everything about German stolze is distasteful and offensive, bringing back memories of just how far German nationalism has gone before.
But Margaret Funnell, a founder of Diana's Circle, a group dedicated to preserving the memory of the princess, said, "This is a distasteful, disgusting thing, really".
The row over whether a distasteful song about dead witches should be given air time will fade in the memory.
To exploit the memory of the Sept. 11 attacks for political gain isn't just distasteful; it's destructive to the values that bring us together.
The initial proposal to relocate the dead was distasteful to Johnston, yet the ensuing debate caused him to want to defend the memory of Robert E. Lee; the need to stay quiet for the sake of the Democratic Party, however, proved decisive.
His father, a dry conforming Unitarian clergyman, had died early, leaving little legacy of affection in his seven-yearold son's memory, and Emerson had liberated himself from a parish minister's duties, including the personally distasteful one of administering the Lord's Supper, before the age of thirty.
