"A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial"
About this Quote
The line flatters our era of hoarding while quietly insulting it. Fadiman treats memory less like a warehouse and more like a newsroom: the competent mind isn’t the one that archives everything, it’s the one that edits. “Trained” is the tell. Forgetting isn’t a failure of character or age; it’s a discipline, a skill you cultivate the way you cultivate taste. That word smuggles in an entire theory of attention: what you keep is a choice, and choices imply values.
The subtext is a rebuke to the fetish for facts as virtue. Trivia can masquerade as intelligence because it’s measurable, quotable, easily performed. Fadiman, an editor and radio/TV literary host who lived by curating culture, is arguing for hierarchy: some details deserve to vanish so patterns can surface. A mind that remembers everything is not “good”; it’s crowded, noisy, manipulable. Forgetting the trivial becomes a form of self-defense against mental clutter and social signaling.
Context matters. Fadiman’s mid-century world was already swelling with mass media, quizzes, digest culture, and the early prestige of information-as-entertainment. His professional life depended on selection: what to read, what to recommend, what to cut. The sentence reads like an editor’s creed recast as personal philosophy. It also gestures at a moral economy of memory: what you forget reveals what you think life is for. Not maximal storage, but coherent meaning.
The subtext is a rebuke to the fetish for facts as virtue. Trivia can masquerade as intelligence because it’s measurable, quotable, easily performed. Fadiman, an editor and radio/TV literary host who lived by curating culture, is arguing for hierarchy: some details deserve to vanish so patterns can surface. A mind that remembers everything is not “good”; it’s crowded, noisy, manipulable. Forgetting the trivial becomes a form of self-defense against mental clutter and social signaling.
Context matters. Fadiman’s mid-century world was already swelling with mass media, quizzes, digest culture, and the early prestige of information-as-entertainment. His professional life depended on selection: what to read, what to recommend, what to cut. The sentence reads like an editor’s creed recast as personal philosophy. It also gestures at a moral economy of memory: what you forget reveals what you think life is for. Not maximal storage, but coherent meaning.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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