Memory loss is like bad weather: You can complain, but there’s little you can do about it. Which is not to say people won’t try.
My wife’s father was a voracious reader, especially of detective stories and history. He had books by the hundreds stacked in his home. One day I noticed many were marked inside with the letter X.
They are “reminders,” my wife said.
“Of what?”
“That he had already read the book.”
I thought it a good strategy against a diminishing memory; nobody wants to travel the same road twice. But recently something happened that made me reconsider.
At a bookstore, I had picked up a novel called The Black Obelisk by Erich Maria Remarque, the German author of All Quiet on the Western Front, which was published in 1928. The plot of The Black Obelisk, which came out in 1956, unfolds in Germany following World War I. It has historical veracity, sharply differentiated characters, Nazis, and, believe it or not, humor. I loved it for the first sixty pages—at which point I realized that I had loved it before, forty-odd years ago.
I was enjoying it so much the second time that I kept going to the end. My pleasure came in different ways: At the first reading I wondered what would happen; the second time around I was full of anticipation for what I knew was coming. I had the sensation that I was walking a familiar path, one strewn with long-undisturbed memories of my own life around the time of that first reading.
It was in 1964; I was seated at a café by a beach in Argentina, hearing Vaughn Monroe’s voice pour out of a scratchy loudspeaker, singing “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” A wild storm broke over the town of Miramar that night, where we were staying, my wife and I and our new daughter. I recalled hearing the waves crump like mortar shells on the beach.
Why, I asked myself, had I not retrieved these memories before? Why had I let them lie there, darkened by the decades that had fallen over them like soot? My mind, or the office within it responsible for organizing and filing memories, apparently decided to lock away those recollections for good. It took the late Herr Remarque to spring them. That these memories had nothing to do with the book itself suggests that anything buried deep in the brain, when dredged up, can have clinging to it things that have nothing to do with the object recovered.
Inspired by The Black Obelisk, I began to root through my library for books that had moved me in the past. First was Walter Kerr’s The Decline of Pleasure, recommended by my college teacher George Brenholtz. I kept it near, this work written by a wearied theater critic. Why? Because I thought he knew what was important to say, even though it was useless to say it: things like “poetry had no place” in a country in thrall to the philosophy of practical utilitarianism. Or “never eat cheap ice cream,” which is to say a loss of taste is a loss of happiness.
Re-reading The Immense Journey, Loren Eiseley’s 1957 masterpiece about human origins (another Brenholtz suggestion), enlightened me as to how mankind is so inextricably linked to the natural world, even as he struggles to break that bond. I recalled not only the diamond sparkle of Eiseley’s writing, but also pleasant evenings with the family Brenholtz in their apartment near College Park. Another book brought to mind a major change in my life: It was 1956 when I decided to join the Army. The year before signing on, I read From Here to Eternity by James Jones, the 1952 novel about American soldiers in Hawaii before Pearl Harbor.
The prospect of a failing memory can be terrorizing, if only because it suggests that the inventory of all the things we know is being drawn down, as if from a bank account. I would not make light of it, but this faltering of memory is, after all, unavoidable and has ever been part of life. How does one deal with the unavoidable? Well, for one thing, put more cash in the account: Read more books, and talk about them. For the last five years, I’ve been a member book club that meets monthly in bars to discuss books that we choose in turn.
According to Robert Lynd, the optimistic Irish author of The Pleasures of Ignorance, there are other compensations. Contrary to the title, Lynd was no dunce and certainly not one to celebrate stupidity. Ignorance, though, is more complicated; it even offers certain opportunities. In this, he was calling attention to a truism: Everything we know is insignificant when compared with the immensity of what we do not know. Our ignorance, large as it is, is certainly not impenetrable. When we try to break free of it, by reading, inquiring, simply paying attention as our time passes by, we gain what he calls “the constant pleasure of discovery.”
Among the literary grandees known to have memory deficiencies, according to Lynd, was Michel de Montaigne, the patron of all essayists: “Montaigne tells us that he had so bad a memory that he could always read an old book as though he had never read it before.” (The experience my father-in-law deflected with his army of X’s.)
While confessing to a leaky mind himself, Lynd yet found his forgetfulness “not altogether miserable.”
And why not?
Because, as he put it, “With a bad memory one can go on reading Plutarch and The Arabian Nights all one’s life.”
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