It’s enough to make you despair: to read everything and remember nothing! For one forgets everything. Do your damnedest, it all vanishes. Here and there a few scraps remain, fragile as those puffs of smoke which show that a train has passed.
— Jules Renard, Journal 1887-1910
As the meme says, “I know that feel, bro.” On the other hand, as Alfred North Whitehead said, civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them. Our puny cerebral hard drives aren’t meant to store photographic reproductions of the millions of words we’ve read. The best we can do is have a well-organized library with some means of being able to find particular passages on demand. In any event, it’s a misapprehension to think that conscious recollection matters most. I don’t need to be consciously aware of all the individual meals I’ve eaten to enjoy the cumulative effects of all that strengthening protein. Likewise, I don’t need to be able to quote pages verbatim from every book I’ve ever read. Everything important has trickled down into some subconscious reservoir which my entire worldview draws upon.