A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past

Lewis Hyde, a MacArthur Fellow and former director of Creative Writing at Harvard University, will discuss his latest book, A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past.

According to The Washington Post, Hyde is “closer to Henry David Thoreau, who relished the sense of losing something instead of pounding his chest to insist that there was never anything to be lost. Thoreau, like Hyde, remembers forgetting, but he is consumed by neither memory nor loss.”

Hyde’s other works include Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art; The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, and a book of poems, This Error Is the Sign of Love. He also edited The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau (North Point Press, 2002), an annotated collection of thirteen of Thoreau’s shorter works.