It was living bodies that were at risk in chapter 6. Antonio offered a pound of his flesh as security lest he forget or lest he be unable to repay the debt in coin on time. People are forgetful. We hardly care that we may be forgetful of things that do not matter, though we may fear the onset of senility when we cannot recall the host of little things that used to plague us when we could not forget them. We do care, however, that some people are forgetful of things in which the forgetting works in their interest, as when my kids refuse to remember, no matter how many times I have yelled and screamed, to clean up their rooms, or whatever paltry chores it is their responsibility to discharge. Debtors are inclined to forget. And should they be lucky enough to have a creditor whose memory is not as self-interestedly selective as theirs, well, then they are home free.

Burning in the Memory

How do we develop the capacity to remember in spite of our interest in forgetting, in spite of desires to live in a very shallow present such as the one lived in Belmont? Creditors, it seems, if not debtors, have an interest in their debtors' capacity for memory. They may even develop ways of creating memory in their debtors, arriving at all kinds of ingenious mnemonics, such as making them put something at risk they cannot forget: such as their hands, their testicles, their son or daughter, their pain receptors.