"I must have made a conscious effort to forget," he says.
The futility of trying to forget gets the following treatment: "When you put in that much effort to forget someone, the effort itself becomes a memory.
There is also an effort to forget the "moral policing" of the past, when Shiv Sena activists harassed couples in parks.
Robert Merivel, the protagonist and narrator of Rose Tremain's Restoration, is much concerned with the effort to forget things – to consign them to "that part of my brain" filled "with utter darkness … into which so much of what I have once known is carefully crammed".
But the novel is kept from getting to the bottom of it by the adult Queeney's effort to forget things instead of figuring them out: "It cannot be repeated too often that circumstances surrounding my early life were such that certain events cannot be recalled without grave disturbance of spirits".
Most significant, the country has made a systematic effort to forget – to forget everything about Vietnam.
His coping mechanism, he tells the camera, is to keep working in an effort to try to forget what he has done.
"In the early hours of a rescue, the urgency of these efforts leads people to forget their own health and safety," said Dr. Neal L. Cohen, New York City's health commissioner.
But what's strange is that despite all my efforts trying not to forget the runoff in the lagoon, I can't quite tell anymore when I'm missing the the real place I left or if it's some idealized version of the complicated paradise that I'm thinking about instead.
