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.