'too much remembering embitters'

Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die, and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us—grandparents, parents, teachers, and older friends. Heartlessness and amnesia seem seem to go together. But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history. There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.

—Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

the past is not strictly unalterable

As Augustine correctly saw, one cannot imagine, and there could not be, any entirely discrete past event unaffected by what came later, just as, to use his example, a note in music is only situated and defined by its place in a sequence, such that the end of a musical composition still to be heard can change the nature of what we have already heard. Certainly there are limits to alteration, even though they cannot be specified: the note remains this note, however far the new relations it enters into may re-disclose it. Nevertheless, these reflections reveal that the past is not strictly unalterable and that the remembered past, although provisional and revisable, is not a sort of hypothesis that can never be confirmed, but is rather the ontologically real past.

—John Milbank, Being Reconciled (2003)

Resentment

Absurdly, [resentment] demands that the irreversible be turned around, that the event be undone. Resentment blocks the exit to the genuine human dimension, the future. I know that the time-sense of the person trapped in resentment is twisted around, disordered, if you wish, for it desires two impossible things: regression into the past and nullification of what happened.

—Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities (1964)