How Many People Have to Remember You Before You're Certain You Exist?

This is an odd country, isn’t it?

My dear Mother used to say, as did so many of yours, “Hate isn’t the opposite of love, indifference is…”

Memory is valued more in the being than the having, and the absence or presence of it is our currency and our punishment.  We could fine people money, but to *really* put the boot in, we fine people the act of being remembered.  And fame is valued beyond its monetary value.  It is as though—finally—the quantity (and therefore quality?) of existence is predicated upon the quality of being remembered.

It is, one feels, a particularly pernicious reward, to be remembered, and an even more final punishment to be forgotten, under such a system.  For in such, if one goes unremembered, has one forgone existence?  And can we, then, save ourselves the unsavoury act of denying continued existence to someone simply by making sure they are forgotten?

We do—and it seems that we can.