`What Is Read with Delight'

My middle son is studying trigonometry and second-year French, and last week he experienced the Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus realization that schooling is often reducible to brute memorization. Public school didn’t prepare him for this reality. Rote learning is disapproved of today, by students and teachers, but there’s no other way to embed functions and irregular verbs in one’s primary data base – that is, memory, preferably long-term. I reached the same conclusion at thirteen, a year younger than Michael, while studying Latin. Vocabulary and grammar must be reviewed with sufficient frequency to become second nature, and it’s a grind. Only then can fluency and ready application follow. Dr. Johnson puts it like this in The Idler #74, published on this date, Sept. 15, in 1759: 

“The necessity of memory to the acquisition of knowledge is inevitably felt and universally allowed, so that scarcely any other of the mental faculties are commonly considered as necessary to a student: he that admires the proficiency of another, always attributes it to the happiness of his memory; and he that laments his own defects, concludes with a wish that his memory was better.” 

The fault is not in capacity. My Uncle Kenneth once referred to an ample-figured woman as “ten pounds of sausage in a five-pound casing.” The metaphor doesn’t work for memory. In my experience, its capacity is elastic and possibly infinite, especially when we are young. That’s the only way I could have memorized so much Longfellow and Eliot, not to mention commercial jingles, sit-com theme songs, Latin verbs and much of the Burl Ives songbook. Strangely, and contrary to much modern thinking, Johnson disapproves of marginalia and the copying of favorite passages. His own memory was legendary, of course, and perhaps its prodigality blinded him to the capacities of lesser mortals. He continues:      

“If the mind is employed on the past or future, the book will be held before the eyes in vain. What is read with delight is commonly retained, because pleasure always secures attention; but the books which are consulted by occasional necessity, and perused with impatience, seldom leave any traces on the mind.”

Common sense commonly disregarded.