If that urge has obvious moral implications when applied to France's murky memory of its wartime complicity, it is born from an impulse more primal than the ethical one.
Choreographed for the Stuttgart Ballet in 1976 in memory of its former director, John Cranko, it can occasionally seem old fashioned, even mawkish.
The medium itself may be exhausted, but not before it produces the memory of its own oblivion.
The apartment is today owned by the city, which honors the memory of its former inhabitants by making it available to foreign writers who have fled persecution.
Scientists studying the soupy, slimy, mush of the moth's larva stage in its cocoon, have discovered it maintains a memory of its past.
Dead neurons are immediately available again in the free pool, but because the memory of its synaptic strengths was erased, it acts as an entirely different neuron.
The Beat's image in its heyday was of a crack dance band with a sharper-than-usual political sensibility, and that's how it remains in the fond memory of its cultists.
But when Gaudí was a boy, Poblet was a ruin and he conceived the mad, devout idea of restoring it to at least a memory of its former glories.
Prey animals often keep the stimulus alive by paradoxical "stalking" of a predator, keeping it in sight so that memory of its presence will not be over-written by foraging.
But it has no processor, storage or memory of its own.
Among older readers and reporters, at least, the newspaper still evokes the memory of its one-time Canadian owner, Lord Beaverbrook, who built it into the undisputed emblem of middle-class, patriotic Britain before his death in 1964.
