Most of us has had the experience of committing something to memory. The multiplication tables; important dates in American history, etc. But how does one go about intentionally forgetting something? The following is from a novel (crime fiction) by Lawrence Block, one of my favorite authors. The protagonist is a contract killer and the excerpt describes how he avoids thinking about the people he kills.

“Years ago he’d learned how to clear his mind after a job. Very deliberately he let himself picture the master bedroom on Caruth Boulevard as he had last seen it. Portia Walmsley lay on her back, stabbed through the heart. Beside her was her unnamed lover, comatose with drink, his fingers clenched around the hilt of the murder weapon. It was the sort of image you’d want to blink away, especially if you’d had something to do with it, but Keller fixed it in his mind and brought it into focus, saw it in full color and sharp relief.”

“And then, as he’d learned to do, he willed the image to grow smaller and less distinct. He shrank it, as if viewing it through the wrong end of a telescope, and he washed out the bright colors, dimming the image to black and white, then fading it to gray. The details blurred, the faces became unrecognizable, and as the image disappeared, the incident itself its emotional charge. It had happened, there was no getting around it, but it was as if it had happened years and years ago, and to somebody else.”

I don’t know if this works. Like everyone, I’ve had moments in my life I’d rather not recall but I’ve never made this kind of conscious effort to forget.