Or Has Time Rewritten Every Line?

I meant to put this up in the memory posts because of one line in the song "Or has time rewritten every line?" But looking at it, The couplet "What's too painful to remember, We simply choose to forget" may be even more appropriate.  I think I believed the first line was from "You Don't Bring Me Flowers Anymore," actually. Such is memory.  Both were Streisand and in the 70s, and the subject and tone of both is the same. "Flowers" may be the better song, but Marvin Hamlisch seems to have understood what happens to memory very well, and captured it succinctly. Even the title captures that what is remembered is not quite what happened. The map is not the terrain. Paul Simon's "The Boxer" has a related line "Still a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest," which is not quite the same thing, but plays off the same brain function oddities.

Some of us believe those are where the fox is hiding. Which is also a myth, perhaps.

Memories
Light the corners of my mind
Misty water-colored memories
Of the way we were

Scattered pictures
Of the smiles we left behind
Smiles we gave to one another
For the way we were

Can it be that
It was all so simple then?
Or has time re-written every line?
If we had the chance to do it all again
Tell me, would we?
Could we?

Memories
May be beautiful and yet
What's too painful to remember
We simply choose to forget

So it's the laughter
We will remember
Whenever we remember
The way we were