A Commonplace Book

"Memorization is a function of duty; knowledge comes only from love."

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.

For a man learns more quickly and remembers more easily that which he laughed at, than that which he approves and than that which he approves and reveres.

Mondaugen's Law:
Personal Density is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.
    Temporal bandwidth is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar "delta-t" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your personal. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even — as Slothrop now — what you're doing here, at the base of this colossal curved embankment....

Pleasurable experiences are fine, but if you don't remember them, you get that pleasure only once, and you can't even be sure of that. Memory has an important function for people.... We talk a great deal about learning from experience, but from which experiences? We don't ordinarily think about learning from eating a meal, but learning from the meal is one reason we eat it. A more important reason, of course, is that we are hungry.

These things do I within, in that vast court of my memory. For there are present with me, heaven, earth, sea, and whatever I could think on therein, besides what I have forgotten. There also meet I with myself, and recall myself, and when, where, and what I have done, and under what feelings. There be all which I remember, either on my own experience, or other's credit. Out of the same store do I myself with the past continually combine fresh and fresh likenesses of things which I have experienced, or, from what I have experienced, have believed: and thence again infer future actions, events and hopes, and all these again I reflect on, as present. "I will do this or that," say I to myself, in that great receptacle of my mind, stored with the images of things so many and so great, "and this or that will follow." "O that this or that might be!" "God avert this or that!" So speak I to myself: and when I speak, the images of all I speak of are present, out of the same treasury of memory; nor would I speak of any thereof, were the images wanting.

Great is this force of memory, excessive great, O my God; a large and boundless chamber! who ever sounded the bottom thereof? yet is this a power of mine, and belongs unto my nature; nor do I myself comprehend all that I am. Therefore is the mind too strait to contain itself. And where should that be, which it containeth not of itself? Is it without it, and not within? how then doth it not comprehend itself? A wonderful admiration surprises me, amazement seizes me upon this. And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and pass themselves by; nor wonder that when I spake of all these things, I did not see them with mine eyes, yet could not have spoken of them, unless I then actually saw the mountains, billows, rivers, stars which I had seen, and that ocean which I believe to be, inwardly in my memory, and that, with the same vast spaces between, as if I saw them abroad. Yet did not I by seeing draw them into myself, when with mine eyes I beheld them; nor are they themselves with me, but their images only. And I know by what sense of the body each was impressed upon me.

Yet not these alone does the unmeasurable capacity of my memory retain. Here also is all, learnt of the liberal sciences and as yet unforgotten; removed as it were to some inner place, which is yet no place: nor are they the images thereof, but the things themselves. For, what is literature, what the art of disputing, how many kinds of questions there be, whatsoever of these I know, in such manner exists in my memory, as that I have not taken in the image, and left out the thing, or that it should have sounded and passed away like a voice fixed on the ear by that impress, whereby it might be recalled, as if it sounded, when it no longer sounded; or as a smell while it passes and evaporates into air affects the sense of smell, whence it conveys into the memory an image of itself, which remembering, we renew, or as meat, which verily in the belly hath now no taste, and yet in the memory still in a manner tasteth; or as any thing which the body by touch perceiveth, and which when removed from us, the memory still conceives. For those things are not transmitted into the memory, but their images only are with an admirable swiftness caught up, and stored as it were in wondrous cabinets, and thence wonderfully by the act of remembering, brought forth.

Thence entered I the recesses of my memory, those manifold and spacious chambers, wonderfully furnished with innumerable stores; and I considered, and stood aghast...

Supposedly, humans are able to hold 7 plus or minus 2 items in memory. This number is based on George Miller's (1956) work on digit span recall tasks. In particular, Miller examined how people encode and recall lists of increasingly difficult digit sequences. He found that people were generally only able to recall between 5 and 9 "chunks" of information (even when given other types of material to study, e.g. words). He concluded that the human memory system has a capacity of 7 plus or minus 2 chunks.

   An historian finds it difficult to re-see films after their initial releases and his memory is not always reliable. I can offer various examples of the fallibility of memory.

   The film which made the strongest impression on me at the end of the "silent" period was Sternberg's Underworld (1927). I therefore felt it important to discuss it in detail with my students at the IDHEC (Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques, Paris) where I taught film history with Jean Mitry after 1944. I described to them in considerable detail an apartment, a stairway, stuffed birds — the lair occupied by the gangster (Bancroft). I described this repeatedly for five or six years until Henri Langlois discovered a print of Underworld for the Cinémathèque Française. As soon as possible I had it projected at IDHEC. But the apartment in the film bore no relation to that in my memory — which I had, I suppose, recalled from The Drag Net, an exactly contemporary film of Sternberg's in which Bancroft also appeared.

   Even the film maker himself does not always have an exact recall of his own work. In 1941, the anti-fascist German writer, Friedrich Wolf, was a war correspondent for the Russians during the fighting near Moscow. He became separated from his unit during the terrible battle and ran into a Soviet patrol who took him for a Nazi parachutist spy because of this strong German accent. In order to identify himself he said he was the script writer of Professor Mmlock, a 1938 Soviet film which had had considerable success in the USSR. He was asked to recount the story for the many soldiers who had seen it, but they judged his summary so inaccurate that he might have been shot if other military personnel had not arrived who identified him. Since I was unable to discuss this dramatic episode with Friedrich Wolf, I can't say whether his own memory was at fault or whether it was the soldiers who had rememered the film inaccurately.

Not only was it difficult for him to comprehend that the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (see from the front). His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them.

There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.

Mann's Doktor Faustus, the formative storybook of my adult years. In it, a brilliant German, by blinding himself to all pursuits but articulation, allows his world to pull itself down around him. I remembered the man, already middle-aged, writing a love letter to the last woman who might have accepted him.

But the letter sabotages itself. It engineers its own rejection. It bares a loneliness that it knows will scare off any attempted comfort. I haven't looked up the passage since first reading it. I will never read it again. The real thing might be too far from the one I've kept in memory. "Consider me," the marriage proposal says, "as a person who suddenly discovers, with an ache at the lateness of the hour, that he might like to have a real home."

True hypermnesiacs (persons gifted with 'photographic' memory) are rare. By no means all are better off for their ability. The memory of the famous patient 'S.' of Russian psychologist A. R. Luria led to mythic tragedy. S. grew unable to distinguish present experiences from his too-vivid recollections of the past, and spent his last years in an insane asylum.

Korsakoff's syndrome also called Korsakoff's Psychosis,or Korsakoff's Disease. Named for Sergey Sergeyevich Korsakov (Korsakoff), a Russian psychiatrist who described it in 1885. A neurological disorder characterized by severe amnesia (memory loss) present in a background of clear perception and full consciousness. Many cases result from severe chronic alcoholism, while others are due to a variety of toxic or infectious brain illnesses, severe head injury, or a thiamine deficiency. Patients with Korsakoff's syndrome typically are unable to remember events in the recent or even the immediate past, and some can store information for only a few seconds before they forget it. The patient may also have forgotten a much longer time period in his life, extending back for as many as 20 years. Another feature that is sometimes present is confabulation; i.e., the patient recounts detailed and convincing memories of events that never happened.

Memory, for Sonnabend, was an illusion. Forgetting, not remembering, was the inevitable outcome of all experience. From this perspective, as he explained in the introduction to his turgid masterwork, "We, amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally fleeting present, have created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible pasage of time and irretrievability of its moments and events" (p.16)

...it's actually quite marvelous, recounting as it does the story of a pair of lovers who seduce each other one evening and the next morning the woman has completely forgotten that they ever met and they have to seduce each other all over again that night, and so on and so forth, night after night thereafter ...

If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.

SOCRATES: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters.

Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon.

To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.

Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

We mustn't model the digital library on the day-to-day operation of a single human brain, which quite properly uses-or-loses, keeps uppermost in mind what it needs most often, and does not refresh, and eventually forgets, what it very infrequently considers -- after all, the principal reason groups of remembers invented writing and printing was to record accurately what they sensed was otherwise likely to be forgotten.