Memory Loss

Everyone thinks that memory loss is the end, that it’s impenetrable.

Anne Michaels, Held (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), p. 84.

Memory is not What the Heart Desires

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Rings (London: HarperCollins, 2007; 1954), p. 493:

Memory is not what the heart desires. That is only a mirror, be it clear as Kheled-zâram.

Past Events

Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon (New York: Picador, 2011; 1970), p.2:

When I was a child I used to be filled with envy when adults recalled events of twelve or fifteen years before. I would think it must be marvellous, to issue those proclamations of experience – ‘It was at least ten years ago’, or ‘I hadn’t seen him for twenty years’. But chronological prestige is tenacious: once attained, it can’t be shed; it increases moment by moment, day by day, pressing its honours on you until you are lavishly, overly endowed with them. Until you literally sink under them. A centenarian has told me that memory protects one from this burden of experience. Whole segments of time dropped out, she said: ‘Of five or six years, say, around the turn of the century, all I can remember is the dress that someone wore, or the colour of a curtain.’ And I would be pleased, rather than otherwise, at the prospect of remembering Naples in similar terms – a lilac dress Gioconda wore one morning driving to Caserta, or the Siena-coloured curtains of the apartment in San Biagio dei Librai. But memory, at an interval of only fifteen years, is less economical and less poetic, still clouded with effects and what seemed to be their causes. The search is still under way in unlikely places – too assiduous, too attenuated; too far from home.

This Lethean Influence of Exile

 Even people whose lives have been made various by learning, sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible – nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas – where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished. Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love, have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile, in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.

George Eliot, Silas Marner (Ware: Wordsworth, 1994; 1861), p. 11.

Facts are Sacred

Tania Branigan, Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2023), p. 194:

Facts are – or should be – sacred, to journalists and historians at least, but facts are not the whole truth; which we select and how we understand and weave them together – that matters too. We think of remembering as retrieval, but in fact it is an act of creation. Our memories grow and change as we do, and truths can harden into something unreal if we repeat them often enough, either because we do so unthinkingly or because we are too careful with them. The consistency of a narrator reassures but can itself be a kind of lie.

Memorising Poetry

At school some learning by heart was compulsory, though not irksome. But this intake was out-distanced many times, as it always is among people who need poetry, by a private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary.

Patrick Leight Fermor, A Time of Gifts: On foot to Constantinople: from the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (London: John Murray, 2004), p. 71.

Memory is Curious, Capricious

   Memory is curious, capricious, incalculable, inexplicable, like all other realities. What is it? Is it a thread? No, rather a nerve rivulet conveying what is left over of a vital experience from somewhere in the past to the present instant. The loss of memory begins with attenuating this flow until it almost stops. Thereupon this something that hitherto had a warmth, as if it were an extension, no matter how remote, of our blood-stream, ceases to be part of us, never to be reintegrated with ourselves, even if we do recapture it and save it for mere use. So much of what only the other day seemed part and parcel of my mental furniture has faded and vanished before I have perceived it. Could I have retained it with timely effort? I could not have believed that I would forget my Greek irregular verbs, the dates of the kings of England, the succession of our presidents, the rivers, the capitals, the boundaries of our individual states. I find that I am forgetting them or have lost them already. Huge lumps of memory break away and melt into oblivion. Why? How? Is memory a tablet, a palimpsest, criss-crossed and written over and over, till no ground is visible through a tangle of inextricable confusion? It that why we cease to retain easily and then not at all after a certain age, and why the tablet breaks off at the edges and cracks in the middle? Again, memory seems to act as if it consisted of a pile of photographic negatives. During our best years these negatives present themselves unbidden when wanted. Now they ignore my orders. What has happened? Have they failed in energy and readiness, have they failed in energy and readiness, have they faded, or is it my ego that can no longer command their obedience?

Bernard Berenson, Sketch for a Self-Portrait (New York: Pantheon, 1949), pp. 15-16.

Forgetfulness

John Gower (c. 1330-1408), The Complete Works of John Gower, 4 vols, ed. by G.C. Macaulay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899-1902), vol. II (1901), p. 317 [Confessio Amantis, IV.573-87]:

For as a man that sodeinli
A gost behelde, so fare I;
So that for feere I can noght gete
Mi witt, bot I miself foryete,
That I wot never what I am,
Ne whider I schal, ne whenne I cam,
Bot muse as he that were amased.
Lich to the bok in which is rased
The lettre, and mai nothing be rad,
So ben my wittes overlad,
That what as evere I thoghte have spoken,
It is out fro myn herte stoken,
And stonde, as who seith, doumb and def,
That all nys worth an yvy lef,
Of that I wende wel have seid.

Memory is Imagination

Alain Robbe-Grillet interviewed by Shusha Guppy, ‘The Art of Fiction No. 91’, The Paris Review, 99 (1986):

INTERVIEWER
   Do you mean that memory is imagination, that we invent our own life in retrospect or indeed as we go along?
 
ROBBE-GRILLET
   Exactly. Memory belongs to the imagination. Human memory is not like a computer that records things; it is part of the imaginative process, on the same terms as invention. In other words, inventing a character or recalling a memory is part of the same process. This is very clear in Proust: For him there is no difference between lived experience—his relationship with his mother, and so forth—and his characters. Exactly the same type of truth is involved.

Forgetting Torah

Sanhedrin 99a.22:

רבי יהושע אומר כל הלומד תורה ומשכחה דומה לאשה שיולדת וקוברת

Rabbi Yehoshua says: Anyone who studies Torah and causes himself to forget it is like a woman who gives birth and buries her newborn child.

Notes:
https://www.sefaria.org/Sanhedrin.99a.22?lang=bi