“Let us, however, give Mnemosyne her due. Because of her I am able to remember inspiring and rapturous communal momentsfor example, the Free Speech Movement rallies in Berkeley, California, in 1965 or the gathering in Central Park in 1980 commemorating the death of John Lennonas well as passionate and numinous personal moments. . . . It would have been insuperable for me to have forgotten lying flat on my back with arms outspread on a field filled with wooly harrow, buckwheat, and live forever overlooking the Pacific Ocean swelling against sculptured rocks in Nothern California on a glorious autumn afternoon, or many nights spent in a lake cottage in western Massachusetts watching the lakes ineffable changes as moon and clouds and stars passed by overhead and noticing the traveling lights of fireflies and tiny planes and their reflections in the water. I remember thinking: Like the flickering stars, the fireflys light leaves a memory of itself.”

—Jonathan Cott, from On the Sea of Memory: A Journey from Forgetting to Remembering, 2005.