In my twenties, I committed to memory all of Keats’ major odes together with a number of soliloquies from Shakespeare’s work and I still can’t describe exactly the effect it had other than to say that it had one. My general impression about memory is that it allows for a sort of panoramic or synchronic insight into a subject that is simply not possible if one is constrained to consulting external texts diachronically. Insofar as the insight is achieved through the diachronic encounters, it’s only because the prior encounters have been retained in memory and so one has actually shifted to the first method here. Memory is the mother of insight.
Very thought-provoking! Thank you!
Sharing my post in return - https://alexandernaumenko.substack.com/p/memory
Thanks for sharing. Looking forward to checking this out.
In my twenties, I committed to memory all of Keats’ major odes together with a number of soliloquies from Shakespeare’s work and I still can’t describe exactly the effect it had other than to say that it had one. My general impression about memory is that it allows for a sort of panoramic or synchronic insight into a subject that is simply not possible if one is constrained to consulting external texts diachronically. Insofar as the insight is achieved through the diachronic encounters, it’s only because the prior encounters have been retained in memory and so one has actually shifted to the first method here. Memory is the mother of insight.
Thanks for sharing this, Max. I think this is just right. And, of course, in Greek mythology, memory (Mnemosyne) is literally the mother of the muses.
You might like this poem from an American poet at the turn of the 19th century.
"Mnemosyne" by Trumbull Stickney
It’s autumn in the country I remember.
How warm a wind blew here about the ways!
And shadows on the hillside lay to slumber
During the long sun-sweetened summer-days.
It’s cold abroad the country I remember.
The swallows veering skimmed the golden grain
At midday with a wing aslant and limber;
And yellow cattle browsed upon the plain.
It’s empty down the country I remember.
I had a sister lovely in my sight:
Her hair was dark, her eyes were very sombre;
We sang together in the woods at night.
It’s lonely in the country I remember.
The babble of our children fills my ears,
And on our hearth I stare the perished ember
To flames that show all starry thro’ my tears.
It’s dark about the country I remember.
There are the mountains where I lived. The path
Is slushed with cattle-tracks and fallen timber,
The stumps are twisted by the tempests’ wrath.
But that I knew these places are my own,
I’d ask how came such wretchedness to cumber
The earth, and I to people it alone.
It rains across the country I remember.