Speak, memory

In the urban societies of the late twentieth century, on the other hand, where everyone is instantly replaceable and really superfluous from birth, we have to keep throwing ballast overboard, forgetting everything that we might otherwise remember: youth, childhood, our origins, our forebears and ancestors. For a while the site called Memorial Grove recently set up on the internet may endure; here you can lay those particularly close to you to rest electronically and visit them. But this virtual cemetery, too, will dissolve into the ether, and the whole past will flow into a formless, indistinct, silent mass. And leaving a present without memory, in the face of a future that no individual mind can now envisage, in the end we shall ourselves relinquish life without feeling any need to linger at least for a while, nor shall we be impelled to pay return visits from time to time. W. G. Sebald Campo Santo