Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are

From Poetry and American Memory by Robert Pinsky.  The subheading is The poet laureate reflects on what makes the American people "a people"—and what our poetry can teach us about the "fragile, heroic enterprise of remembering."

Re-creation is not memory but spectacle—and spectacle may stand for the body of the past but not its soul.

The, later:

Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.