Notes from Oxford’s Backroom: Of Forgetting

What have we forgotten? In the first few pages of the Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius, who awaits trial for supposed treason, must confront this question. After his pitiable laments and wails, Philosophy, herself, visits Boethius and soberly recounts:

He has forgotten for the moment who he is, but he will soon remember once he has identified me first. To help him in this, I must spend a moment wiping his eyes, for the darkness of his mortal concerns has clouded them.

What does it mean to forget Philosophy? How can we possibly forget ourselves? Do we choose to forget? Why do we forget? These questions have haunted me since I first encountered them. Yet as fate would reveal, it took packing up my life and moving to England to even begin attempting to find an answer. 

I arrived at Oxford, frankly, not knowing what to expect. I had never been to Europe, let alone the majestic countryside of England. Excited by the prospect of adventure (and bikeless), I walked in circles on what seemed to be never ending roads, trying to find something familiar in the unfamiliar. I remember staring in awe at the red phone booths whisked straight out of a Dr. Who-esque world, a reminder of my childhood, though, different from the blue phone booths imprinted in my memory. I began to see myself in the ducks wading in the Cherwell River, traversing a new territory, carried by the motion of the waves. 

Intellectually, I similarly felt as though I was starting from scratch. Though the questions that drove my studies in political theory continued to guide me, I was now navigating the unfamiliar world of classical Indian thought. Spurred by a desire for community, I attended and presented at my first graduate indology conference. Walking in, I was giddy with anticipation, but I quickly felt lost in a swarm of ideas and people that felt unfamiliar to me. Being the only person in the room who did not already know Sanskrit and seemingly the only one who had not read their text (in my case, the Bhagavadgītā) in the original language, I thought I had nothing worthwhile to offer. But, in the conversations that ensued over dinner, I was proven wrong. A fellow attendee told me that he found my presentation refreshing as it reminded him of the value of a text that he had only read when he first dipped his toes in the discipline of indology. He had forgotten and I had helped him remember. 

It is particularly apt that this conversation happened with the Bhagavadgītā at the forefront. To offer some context, the dialogue forms Book VI of the larger epic, the Mahābhārata. Arjuna, a warrior, is dismayed at the thought of fighting in the ongoing battle of Kurukshetra, a battle between two parts of his family– the Pandavas and Kauravas. Paralyzed by the realization that he must fight against and kill his cousins, uncles, and mentors to bring victory to the Pandavas, Arjuna is entrapped in an impossible situation, torn between his familial ties and his martial duties. Krishna, who embodies God, then goes through great pains to convince Arjuna to fight in the battle. However, Arjuna cannot come to terms with fighting in the war until he lays his eyes upon Krishna’s true form. Arjuna has forgotten who he is until he encounters truth, mirroring Boethius in his encounter with Philosophy. 

Let us take a moment to pause and think. Have we forgotten ourselves? Modernity constantly thrusts us forward, and in a world obsessed with glory and preparation for what’s next, we chase after images of who we aspire to be rather than grappling with who we are. We have forgotten ourselves. In the midst of constant moral and political strife, it becomes evident why this is so detrimental. In forgetting ourselves, we forget what it means to be a human being. In forgetting what it means to be a human being, we forget our common humanity and fail to treat others with dignity. We are called, then, to take time to reflect upon ourselves. 

I, too, am guilty of forgetting to spend time seeking the story of my soul. During term, my greatest academic challenge was learning Sanskrit. Coming in, I only knew the alphabet and a handful of the vowel signs. Yet, my coursework demanded that I learn much more. In order to make it through the weekly quizzes and complete the daily homework assignments in addition to balancing a full course load and other commitments, I naturally regressed into the all-too-familiar fight or flight mode. I panicked and blindly memorized everything I possibly could— the seemingly endless grammar rules, verb roots, tenses, noun endings, and vocabulary, to name a few. As the cyclical nature of motion and rest ordained, however, everything eventually came crashing down. I experienced what, unfortunately, most do during their first term at Oxford: week 5 blues. This is the point in term where there are still three more weeks to go but one has exhausted all energy and will to make it through, to put it bluntly. As I sat on the couch in my college’s common room and sunk deeper and deeper into the cushion, I came to a startling epiphany: I didn’t actually know anything. 

I realized that I had been treating Sanskrit as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. I could not articulate the fundamentals of grammar rules and their application, let alone understand the derivation of a verb root. From thereon out, I took a step back and sought to understand what I had rashly memorized. I came to see Sanskrit as akin to a puzzle and each grammatical concept, a part of the whole. I grew intrigued by the grammarians’ emphasis on identifying the kartṛ (agent) of a sentence rather than a subject. I was fascinated by the causative forms; these involve one individual “making” someone else perform an action i.e. “she made him run through the forest.” I debated the implications of these forms for the existence of free will with my tutor as well as any poor soul who was willing to lend me an ear, all the while my philosophical insides tingled with a familiar feeling. I had forgotten about the beauty of Sanskrit, but it had found me.

Sanskrit itself is widely assumed to be a “dead language.” After all, much like a sheet of music being rendered nothing more than a piece of paper covered in disparate lines and symbols without a musician to bring them to life, it seems that language becomes obsolete without its spoken component. I am not particularly fond of this phrase since many, including myself, continue to attempt to learn and speak the language. Nevertheless, we can ask ourselves: what have we forgotten in deeming languages like Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, and Latin “dead”? Are these languages better understood as forgotten rather than dead? 

In my re-found appreciation for Sanskrit, I discovered what my name meant. Past participles have been the bane of my existence, but ironically, my name itself is a past participle. Prerita is the one who is impelled or sent forth. Naturally, I have been wondering since what I am impelled by. God? Truth? Happiness? Love? (if these are even inseparable). I was reminded of my favorite lines from Ralph Ellison’s Essay, “That Same Pain, That Same Pleasure”:

Sometimes you get a sense of mission even before you are aware of it. An act is demanded of you but you’re like a sleepwalker searching for some important object, and when you find it you wake up to discover that it is the agency through which that mission, assigned [to] you long ago, at a time you barely understood the command, could be accomplished.

Perhaps, I was given a sense of mission by virtue of my name. Perhaps, we all begin our lives with a sense of mission. It seems natural to seek something outside of ourselves, but we must proceed with caution. We, as human beings, are on an endless quest to make sense of ourselves. On the way, however, we forget ourselves. If we forget ourselves for longer than a moment and cannot remember, we lose our way back home entrapped in the trance-like state of a subconscious sleepwalker. If we lose our way back home to ourselves, we, like Boethius and Arjuna, lose our agency—the very principle that defines us as human beings.

This may be a grim way to look at life. We could also have faith that we will find the object that we are destined to and, in the process, learn a whole lot about ourselves. This has certainly been the case for me in my studies and life as I strive towards truth. I, undeniably, forget myself at times and likely have still forgotten parts of myself, but through encounters with people (both living and those alive through the works they have left behind) and with the world, I can remember again. As John Henry Cardinal Newman reminds us in his sermon on “The Philosophical Temper, First Enjoined by the Gospel,” “it is obvious that to be in earnest in seeking the truth is an indispensable requisite for finding it.” To be earnest requires not only an eye fixed on truth as the ends but perpetual self-reflection, asking ourselves who we are so that we may not forget. 

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