Kieran Setiya wrote about reading or not reading books and wondering about what becomes of forgotten books and I commented: I'm so thankful for books. I do wonder what remains when we forget. I think books become like cellular memory. Like dreams we can't recall that still influence our thoughts and feelings the following day. All thought is communal anyway, whether written in books or not. I watched a symposium on oral culture wherein the indigenous wisdom was "lost" when the written word became the norm, but the people were able to retrieve what was lost. I've sometimes had the experience of writing something without knowing where it came from. Probably partly from forgotten books.