A GOOD MEMORY SELECTS ITS MATERIAL.--The best memory is not necessarily
the one which impartially repeats the largest number of facts of past
experience. Everyone has many experiences which he never needs to have
reproduced in memory; useful enough they may have been at the time, but
wholly useless and irrelevant later. They have served their purpose, and
should henceforth slumber in oblivion. They would be but so much rubbish
and lumber if they could be recalled. Everyone has surely met that
particular type of bore whose memory is so faithful to details that no
incident in the story he tells, no matter however trivial, is ever
omitted in the recounting. His associations work in such a tireless
round of minute succession, without ever being able to take a jump or a
short cut, that he is powerless to separate the wheat from the chaff; so
he dumps the whole indiscriminate mass into our long-suffering ears.
