Life & Wisdom Quote by Edgar Allan Poe

Poe’s joke lands because it weaponizes the very tool of self-control: the reminder. The line is phrased like practical advice, but it’s really a sly diagnosis of how attention misbehaves. The moment you formally declare something “to be remembered,” you’ve turned it into a special object in the mind, an anxious talisman. That performative act doesn’t stabilize memory; it destabilizes it. It breeds the jittery self-monitoring that makes recall harder, like trying to fall asleep by repeating “sleep” to yourself.

The intent is double-edged. On one level, Poe is puncturing bourgeois faith in systems: lists, notes, little moral ledgers of the self. On another, he’s revealing a darker subtext familiar to anyone who has spiraled: when memory becomes a task, it becomes haunted. The instruction to remember invites the possibility of failure, and that fear becomes the most memorable thing in the room. You don’t forget the fact; you forget it under the glare of obligation.

Context matters: Poe writes from an era fascinated by the mechanics of the mind, where “faculty psychology” and parlor theories of memory mixed with a growing culture of documentation - letters, diaries, records that promised permanence. Poe, always suspicious of neat rationality, tweaks the promise: the more you insist on mastery, the more the mind slips its leash. It’s witty, but it’s also a compact Poe worldview - the psyche as a booby-trapped house where intention can trigger the trap.