We can tell much about it, but you must not ask us what it is. On seeing a face I am aware that I have seen it before, or that I have not seen it before. On hearing a fact told I am aware that I knew it already. You say the first words of the old song, and I finish the line and the stanza. But where I have them, or what becomes of them when I am not thinking of them for months and years, that they should lie so still, as if they did not exist, and yet so nigh that they come on the instant when they are called for, never any man was so sharp-sighted, or could turn himself inside out quick enough to find.

  ’Tis because of the believed incompatibility of the affirmative and advancing attitude of the mind with tenacious acts of recollection that people are often reproached with living in their memory. Late in life we live by memory, and in our solstices or periods of stagnation; as the starved camel in the desert lives on his humps. Memory was called by the schoolmen vespertina cognitio, evening knowledge, in distinction from the command of the future which we have by the knowledge of causes, and which they called matutina cognitio, or morning knowledge …

  The damages of forgetting are more than compensated by the large values which new thoughts and knowledge give to what we already know. If new impressions sometimes efface old ones, yet we steadily gain insight; and because all nature has one law and meaning, – part corresponding to part, – all we have known aids us continually to the knowledge of the rest of nature. Thus, all the facts in this chest of memory are property at interest. And who shall set a boundary to this mounting value? Shall we not on higher stages of being remember our early history better? …

  We learn early that there is great disparity of value between our experiences; some thoughts perish in the using. Some days are bright with thought and sentiment, and we live a year in a day. Yet these best days are not always those which memory can retain. This water once spilled cannot be gathered. There are more inventions in the thoughts of one happy day than ages could execute, and I suppose I speak the sense of most thoughtful men when I say, I would rather have a perfect recollection of all I have thought and felt in a day or a week of high activity than read all the books that have been published in a century.

  The memory is one of the compensations which Nature grants to those who have used their days well; when age and calamity have bereaved them of their limbs or organs, then they retreat on mental faculty and concentrate on that. The poet, the philosopher, lamed, old, blind, sick, yet disputing the ground inch by inch against fortune, finds a strength against the wrecks and decays sometimes more invulnerable than the heyday of youth and talent …

  The memory has a fine art of sifting out the pain and keeping all the joy. The spring days when the bluebird arrives have usually only few hours of fine temperature, are sour and unlovely; but when late in autumn we hear rarely a bluebird’s notes they are sweet by reminding us of the spring. Well, it is so with other tricks of memory. Of the most romantic fact the memory is more romantic; and this power of sinking the pain of any experience and of recalling the saddest with tranquillity, and even with a wise pleasure, is familiar. The memory is as the affection. Sampson Reed says, ‘The true way to store the memory is to develop the affections.’ A souvenir is a token of love. Remember me means, Do not cease to love me. We remember those things which we love and those things which we hate. The memory of all men is robust on the subject of a debt due to them, or of an insult inflicted on them. ‘They can remember,’ as Johnson said, ‘who kicked them last.’ …

  Memory is a presumption of a possession of the future. Now we are halves, we see the past but not the future, but in that day will the hemisphere complete itself and foresight be as perfect as aftersight.

  From DAVID SHENK, The Forgetting (2003)

  On November 12, 1879, two years after he never quite heard, never quite understood, and then entirely forgot Mark Twain’s tale of the three famous tramps, Ralph Waldo Emerson, age seventy-six, gave a lecture at the home of Harvard Divinity School professor C.C. Everett. Though Emerson’s dementia had steadily progressed over the decade, and he had not written an original lecture in four years, he still occasionally read aloud from old works.

  On this particular night, the aging Transcendentalist made a sharply ironic choice of material. Of all things, he read from his twenty-two-year-old essay, ‘Memory’. ‘Without it,’ Emerson intoned, ‘all life and thought were an unrelated succession. As gravity holds matter from flying off into space, so memory gives stability to knowledge; it is the cohesion which keeps things from falling into a lump or flowing in waves …

  ‘Memory performs the impossible for man by the strength of his divine arms; holds together past and present, beholding both, existing in both, abides in the flowing, and gives continuity and dignity to human life. It holds us to our family, to our friends. Hereby a home is possible; hereby only a new fact has value.’

  How poignant, and how awful, that as Emerson read aloud these evocative words, his own memory was broken. Much like H.M., he could form no new memories at all. His life from moment to moment was an unrelated succession. There was no more continuity except that provided for him by friends and family. At this particular reading, his daughter and caregiver Ellen stood by as a sort of Seeing Eye memory guide. He continually looked up at her to be sure he did not repeat words or sentences.

  This was not just an exercise in caution. Without her help, Emerson had recently lost his place many times in lectures, skipped or repeated sentences, and even reread entire pages over again without noticing. In at least one public reading, he had stopped suddenly in the middle of his material and stood silently at the lectern, oblivious. ‘His words are either not all written or not well remembered,’ ran a typically disappointed review of these years from the New Brunswick Daily Times. ‘… He shows a want of fluency in language, and frequently descends to a tone even fainter than the conversational, and a manner unpleasantly hesitant.’

  We will never know for sure, of course, whether Emerson was beset with what we now call ‘Alzheimer’s disease’. No one bothered to look at the folds of his brain after he died, and if they had they would not have been able to discern anything as detailed as plaques and tangles. Alois Alzheimer was, at the time of Emerson’s decline, still a raucous Bavarian youth. Franz Nissl had not yet invented his important tissue stains. Emil Kraepelin had not proposed his radical ideas about autotoxins and organic brain diseases.

  From HIPPOLYTE TAINE, On Intelligence (1870)

  I meet casually in the street a person whose appearance I am acquainted with, and say to myself at once that I have seen him before. Instantly the figure recedes into the past, and wavers about there vaguely, without at once fixing itself in any spot. It persists in me for some time, and surrounds itself with new details. ‘When I saw him he was bare-headed, with a working-jacket on, painting in a studio; he is so-and-so, of such-and-such a street. But when was it? It was not yesterday, nor this week, nor recently. I have it: he told me that he was waiting for the first leaves to come out to go into the country. It was before the spring. But at what exact date? I saw, the same day, people carrying branches in the streets and omnibuses: it was Palm Sunday!’ Observe the travels of the internal figure, its various shiftings to front and rear along the line of the past; each of these mental sentences has been a swing of the balance. When confronted with the present sensation and with the latent swarm of indistinct images which repeat our recent life, the figure first recoiled suddenly to an indeterminate distance. Then, completed by precise details, and confronted with all the shortened images by which we sum up the proceedings of a day or a week, it again receded beyond the present day, beyond yesterday, the day before, the week, still farther, beyond the ill-defined mass constituted by our recent recollections. Then something said by the painter was recalled, and it at once receded again beyond an almost precise limit, which is marked by the image of the green leaves and denoted by the word spring. A moment afterwards, thanks to a new detail, the recollection of the branches, it has shifted again, but forward this time, not backward; and, by a reference to the calendar, is situated at a precise point, a week further back than Easter, and five weeks nearer than the carnival, by the double effect of the contrary impulsions, pushing it, one forward and the other backward, and which are, at a particular moment, annulled by one another.

  From HENRI BERGSON, Matter and Memory (1896), translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (1911)

  If matter, so far as extended in space, is to be defined (as I believe it must) as a present which is always beginning again, inversely, our present is the very materiality of our existence, that is to say, a system of sensations and movements, and nothing else. And this system is determined, unique for each moment of duration, just because sensations and movements occupy space, and because there cannot be in the same place several things at the same time. – Whence comes it that it has been possible to misunderstand so simple, so evident a truth, one which is, moreover, the very idea of common sense?

  The reason lies simply in the fact that philosophers insist on regarding the difference between actual sensations and pure memory as a mere difference in degree, and not in kind. In our view the difference is radical. My actual sensations occupy definite portions of the surface of my body; pure memory, on the other hand, interests no part of my body. No doubt, it will beget sensations as it materialises; but at that very moment it will cease to be a memory and pass into the state of a present thing, something actually lived; and I shall only restore to it its character of memory by carrying myself back to the process by which I called it up, as it was virtual, from the depths of my past. It is just because I made it active that it has become actual, that is to say, a sensation capable of provoking movements. But most psychologists see in pure memory only a weakened perception, an assembly of nascent sensations. Having thus effaced, to begin with, all difference in kind between sensation and memory, they are led by the logic of their hypothesis to materialise memory and to idealise sensation. They perceive memory only in the form of an image; that is to say, already embodied in nascent sensations. Having thus attributed to it that which is essential to sensation, and refusing to see in the ideality of memory something distinct, something contrasted with sensation itself, they are forced, when they come back to pure sensation, to leave to it that ideality with which they have thus implicitly endowed nascent sensations. For if the past, which by hypothesis is no longer active, can subsist in the form of a weak sensation, there must be sensations that are powerless. If pure memory, which by hypothesis interests no definite part of the body, is a nascent sensation, then sensation is not essentially localised in any point of the body. Hence the illusion that consists in regarding sensation as an ethereal and unextended state which acquires extension and consolidates in the body by mere accident: an illusion which vitiates profoundly, as we have seen, the theory of external perception, and raises a great number of the questions at issue between the various metaphysics of matter. We must make up our minds to it: sensation is, in its essence, extended and localised; it is a source of movement; – pure memory, being inextensive and powerless, does not in any degree share the nature of sensation.

  From R.G. COLLINGWOOD, Speculum Mentis, or the Map of Knowledge (1924)

  A mind which knows its own change is by that very knowledge lifted above change. History, and the same is true of memory … is the mind’s triumph over time. In the … process of thought, the past lives in the present, not as a mere ‘trace’ or effect of itself on the physical organism, but as the object of the mind’s historical knowledge of itself in an eternal present.

  From BERTRAND RUSSELL, Human Knowledge, its Scopes and Limits (1948)

  Memory is the purest example of mirror knowledge. When I remember a piece of music or a friend’s face, my state of mind resembles, though with a difference, what it was when I heard the music or saw the face. If I have sufficient skill, I can play the music or paint the face from memory, and then compare my playing or painting with the original, or rather with something which I have reason to believe closely similar to the original. But we trust our memory, up to a point, even if it does not pass this test. If our friend appears with a black eye, we say, ‘How did you get that injury?’ not ‘I had forgotten that you had a black eye.’ The tests of memory, as we have already had occasion to notice, are only confirmations; a considerable degree of credibility attaches to a memory on its own account, particularly if it is vivid and recent.

  A memory is accurate, not in proportion to the help it gives in handling present and future facts, but in proportion to its resemblance to a past fact. When Herbert Spencer, after fifty years, saw again the lady he had loved as a young man, whom he had imagined still young, it was the very accuracy of his memory which incapacitated him from handling the present fact. In regard to memory, the definition of ‘truth’, and therefore of ‘knowledge’, lies in the resemblance of present imagining to past sensible experience. Capacity for handling present and future facts may be confirmatory in certain circumstances, but can never define what we mean when we say that a certain memory is ‘knowledge’.

  From LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, Philosophical Investigations (1953)

  William James, in order to shew that thought is possible without speech, quotes the recollection of a deaf-mute, Mr Ballard, who wrote that in his early youth, even before he could speak, he had had thoughts about God and the world. – What can he have meant? – Ballard writes: ‘It was during those delightful rides, some two or three years before my initiation into the rudiments of written language, that I began to ask myself the question: how came the world into being?’ – Are you sure – one would like to ask – that this is the correct translation of your wordless thought into words? And why does this question – which otherwise seems not to exist – raise its head here? Do I want to say that the writer’s memory deceives him? – I don’t even know if I should say that. These recollections are a queer memory phenomenon, – and I do not know what conclusions one can draw from them about the past of the man who recounts them.

  The words with which I express my memory are my memory-reaction.

  From OWEN BARFIELD, History in English Words (1962)

  Evoking history from words is like looking back at our own past through memory: we see it, as it were, from within. Something has stimulated the memory – a smell, a taste, or a fragment of melody – and an inner light is kindled, but we cannot tell how far that light will throw its beams. Language, like the memory, is not an automatic diary: and it selects incidents for preservation, not so much according to their intrinsic significance as according to the impression they happen to have made upon the national consciousness.

  From MARY WARNOCK, Memory (1987)

  The peculiar value we attach to discursive memory, the recollection of what things were like, seems to derive from its connection with imagination in the developing story of a life.

  From PAUL RICOEUR, Memory, History, Forgetting (2000), translated by Bridget Patterson

  In the context of education – only one part of the paidea, as we will soon see – recitation was for a long time the preferred method of instruction, controlled by teachers through texts considered to be, if not the founders of taught culture, at least as prestigious in the sense of texts accepted as having authority. For in the end it is all about authority, or what can more exactly be termed an enunciative authority, to differentiate it from institutional authority. This meaning has connotations in the most fundamental sense with a political concept to do with the establishment of social ties. It is impossible to conceive of a society whose horizontal axis of living together does not intersect with the vertical axis of the authority of the Ancients, as in the old adage quoted by Hannah Arendt: ‘potestas in populo, auctoritas in senatu.’fn3 The supremely political issue is knowing who the ‘senate’ is, who the ‘Ancients’ are, and where their authority comes from. Education has evolved without addressing this problem, apparently protected from facing a challenge in terms of its legitimacy. Whatever this enigma of authority may in fact be – at the heart of what Rousseau called the ‘labyrinth of politics’ – every society is responsible for the transgenerational transfer of what it holds to be its cultural knowledge. For each generation, acquiring this knowledge saves it the exhausting effort of re-learning everything from scratch every time, as suggested earlier. So in Christian societies people have been learning to recite the catechism for a long time. It is how the rules of writing correctly have been learned – ah! dictation! –, as well as those of grammar and arithmetic. And it is in the same way again that we learn the rudiments of a dead language or a foreign one – ah! Greek and Latin declensions and conjugations! As young children we memorised nursery rhymes and songs; then fables and poems; in this respect have we not moved too far away from the battle against learning by heart? Happy the person who can still, like Jorge Semprun, murmur to a dying man – Maurice Halbwachs,fn4 alas! – Baudelaire’s lines: ‘O death, old captain, it is time, let us lift anchor … our hearts that are known to you are filled with radiance …’ But learning by heart is not exclusive only to an old-fashioned school. A good many professionals – doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, teachers, etc – have recourse throughout their lives to an extensive memorisation of knowledge based on dossiers, lists of items and rules, and stand ready to put them into practice at the right moment. They are all expected to have trained memories.

  That’s not all: neither the pedagogical nor professional use of memorising can exhaust the treasure-trove of methods of learning ratified by a recitation without mistakes or hesitation. It is important to remember at this point all the arts which Henri Gouhier put under the generic heading of binary arts – dance, theatre, music – where the execution is distinct from the work written in a book, a score, or some sort of inscription. These arts require from their practitioners a laborious training of memory, relying on dogged and patient repetition until they can achieve a performance at once faithful and innovative, in which the preliminary work can be forgotten in the presence of what appears to be a spontaneous improvisation. How can we fail to admire these dancers, actors and musicians who have sometimes mentally recorded fabulous repertoires which they ‘execute’ for our pleasure? They are real athletes of memory. They may provide the only unarguable evidence of its use without abuse, obedience to the demands of their work inspiring them with a humility capable of tempering their rightful pride in the feat they have accomplished.