Hyde describes A Primer for Forgetting as “a thought experiment seeking out places where forgetting is more useful than memory,” so the deployment of this hijacked historical memory might seem curious, as it militates against Hyde’s thesis. But Hyde is always an honest broker of ideas. An open-hearted interdisciplinarian who traces arguments across anthropology, history, poetry, and other fields, he is best known for his first book, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. A 2008 magazine profile of Hyde called his work “almost impossible to summarize,” but let’s just say that in The Gift, it is Hyde’s assumption “that works of art exist simultaneously in two ‘economies,’ a market economy and a gift economy,” and the book is in part an attempt to address the opposed imperatives of those systems.
Hyde’s arguments are complicated, but one can think of them as stubborn refusals to take the established order for granted. In The Gift, it’s the market economy. In Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership, it’s the copyright regime. In A Primer for Forgetting, Hyde wants to trouble our notion of memory as always preferable to forgetfulness. In a series of sometimes interlocking and sometimes obliquely connected “notebook” entries, Hyde makes his case — or examines its failure.
On the most basic level, Hyde argues that we need “forgetting” in order to access abstract concepts: we must “forget many particular trees before we can know Tree itself,” he observes. We also need forgetting to both make and experience art. This leads to Hyde’s omnipresent concern: by what magic do creators conjure their creations? He quotes E. M. Forster: “The poet wrote the poem no doubt, but he forgot himself while he wrote it, and we forget him while we read.”
That idea, being what we might call “in the zone,” has a name in positive psychology: “flow state.” It’s that feeling of being present and fully absorbed in a task. The concept’s originator, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, modestly calls it “the secret to happiness.” In Hyde’s telling, our brains must be nimble in acquiring and discarding ideas, while keeping open a space in which new ideas may occur. If we pitched Primer to TED Talk habitués, we could call it “The Life-Changing Magic of Letting Things Go.” But Hyde could never give a TED Talk. He refuses to sand the edges or round off the corners of his ideas. And when he extends his thought experiment from the individual to the communal, or national, uses of forgetting, he confronts the limits of his approach.