Monotony collapses time. Novelty unfolds it.

Kissing could have begun as a way of sniffing out who's who. From a whiff to a kiss was just a short trip across the face.

It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. "To think," Borges writes, "is to forget.

If you were a medieval scholar reading a book, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you'd never see that particular text again, and so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read. You couldn't just pull a book off the shelf to consult it for a quote or an idea.

A meaningful relationship between two people cannot sustain itself only in the present tense.

The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it.

How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by losing ourselves in our Blackberries, our iPhones, by not paying attention to the human being across from us who is talking with us, by being so lazy that we're not willing to process deeply?