“We not only tend to forget what we have once remembered,” he wrote, “but we also tend to remember what we have once forgotten.” Memory does not have just one tendency over time, toward decay. It has two. The other—“reminiscence,” Ballard called it—is a kind of growth, a bubbling up of facts or words that we don’t recall having learned in the first place. Both tendencies occur in the days after we’ve tried to memorize a poem or a list of words.
