Aldous Huxley in Along the Road.

Jorge Luis Borges expanded this idea in “Funes, His Memory” (also sometimes translated as “Funes, the Memorious”). It’s a quick read; here’s a quote*:

Funes, we must not forget, was virtually incapable of general, platonic ideas. Not only was it difficult for him to see that the generic symbol “dog” took in all the dissimilar individuals of all shapes and sizes, it irritated him that the “dog” of three-fourteen in the afternoon, seen in profile, should be indicated by the same noun as the dog of three-fifteen, seen frontally. His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them. Swift wrote that the emperor of Lilliput could perceive the movement of the minute hand of a clock; Funes could continually perceive the quiet advances of corruption, of tooth decay, of weariness. He saw - he noticed - the progress of death, of humidity. He was the solitary, lucid spectator of a multiform, momentaneous, and almost unbearably precise world.

It’s a useful reminder that just as memory has its power, so does forgetting.

* The wording’s actually a bit different than in the link since I’m using a different translation from Andrew Hurley, as found in my copy of Borges’ Collected Fictions.