Significante

Forgetting is the most complicated of locks, but it is only a lock. It is not an eraser or a sword, it does not efface, nor does it kill; it imprisons. I know now that the mind picks up everything, files it, classifies it, and keeps it all. It all has meaning: even what I think I have not seen, heard, or felt, even what I think I haven't understood, even the minds of others. Every event, no matter how minuscule, no matter how ordinary (as, for example, stretching in the morning when yawning), is catalogued, labelled, and locked away in oblivion, but marked in consciousness by a signal which is often microscopic: a scented sprig, a flash of colour, a blinking light, a fragment of sensation, a shattering word. And less even than that: a rustling, an echo. And still less, even: a nothing that is nevertheless something.
Marie Cardinal, The Words to Say It