Forgetfulness
by Billy Collins
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
Video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrEPJh14mcU (Forgetfulness)
Forgetfulness… What is forgetfulness? Based on my understanding, forgetfulness is the tendency to forget or failure to remember or loss memory. The poem “forgetfulness” by Billy Collins is a nice poem, what the poem say is very true as people tend to forget this and that. This is because I myself sometimes also can forget this and that.
We can see that how unique is our brain. We can use our brain to store information and some others things in our daily life. Instead of remembering, we can also forgetting. Something that we store in our brain a long time ago can be forgotten, as we are not constantly using it. Like what is in the poem, we can forget how to swim or ride a bicycle when we are not use with it. So, this is not the long term memory. Forgetting can be reduced by repetition and/or more elaborate cognitive processing of information. When we constantly repeat the same process, it will stick to our mind and thus we will remember easily.
Looking at the word ‘forgetfulness’, now I realise that nobody is perfect, everyone can forget even a very small matter. ‘Forgetfulness’ can occur at any stage of age, anytime and anyone, not that only the aging people can forget.
So, as the educators, we must try to understand the students’ condition when they are in this situation-forgetfulness as this also occurs in the educators themselves.
2 comments:
I totally agree with you that as an educator, we must be more considerate as sometime students are not porposely to forget this and that. Since we are human, not God, we can do anything in a perfect manner, but anyway i still believe that with confidence, perseverance and courage, there is nothing in this world that cannot be accomplished.
yaya, i also have the same feeling as you. Anyway, thanks for ur comment. ^^
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