Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

     This blog post was inspired by the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that I watched a few weekends ago. I would highly recommend the movie. It is beautifully filmed and stars Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet as Joel and Clementine, a couple in love. However the main idea of the movie and what I want to focus on in this post is the importance of memories. The movie has two quotes in it that address this topic and that I wanted to figure what they meant exactly. 

The first was a quote by Friedrich Nietzsche:

"Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders."

The second was a quote from Alexander Pope:

"How happy is the blameless vestal's lot

The world forgetting by the world forgot

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind

Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd."

     The quotes both express the idea that "ignorance is bliss." In the first quote, forgetful people are lucky because they don't remember the bad things they've done. They only remember the good parts even of their "blunders", or mistakes.
     The second quote is longer and a bit more complicated to understand. In the first line, a "vestal" means a chaste or pure woman and "blameless" means innocent since the woman hasn't done anything. She is happy in her innocence and purity. The second line refers to the fact that the woman does not have wordly concerns. She doesn't worry about the world and it doesn't worry about her because they have forgotten about each other. The third line is probably my favorite because I think it is just beautifully worded and it is the title of the movie. It basicaly says that the mind that is clear of bad memories, "spotless", is the happiest since it is in "eternal sunshine." The last line is saying that the woman's prayers for forgetting her problems have been answered and now she has no more wishes. She is completely happy now since she has forgotten her sins.
     Although both quotes seem to express that forgetting the bad in your life makes you happy, the movie overall disagreed with this message. The characters seek to forget certain bad relationships in their past and are able to undergo a procedure that completely wipes away their memory of that relationship. In the end, they fall in love with the same people again and slowly uncover that this is the second time that they've been in a relationship. Some characters find that they didn't want to forget their past completely because then they would lose their good memories as well. Others learned that they didn't want to forget their past because they hated the fact that they made the same mistake twice.
     From this movie I have come to believe that though ignorance may be bliss, we are better in the end if we remember our mistakes and learn from them. 
Do you think that ignorance is bliss? How do you interpret the above quotes? Would people be better if we could forget the bad in our lives?