Hades, the land of the death for the ancient Greek, was crossed by 5 rivers. One of them, the River Lethe, was the river of forgetfulness and the dead, as they prepared to reincarnate and return to the realm of the living, drank from its waters, forgeting their previous life and experiences.
Alethea, the Greek word for truth, means the opposite of forgetfulness, something like unforgeting, bringing us to the platonic concept of knowledge as rememberance.
My personal Lethe takes often the shape of a narrow and shallow unamed Wiltshire river as seen by the faint light of a Winter morning, covered by that sort of low, thick fog that we can see from above and feels like something almost solid. The fog only covers the water and is a living creature, waiting for our consent to envelop us, guiding us through the memories we don't remember and then returning us to ourselves.
We look around with a vacant stare and the same feeling that we have when we try to remember and keep a dream that has already faded.
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