Beyond a certain age, frayed memory becomes a consistently worrisome theme among contemporaries. (How unfortunate that we don’t forget to talk about it.) Forgetting the name of the group that recorded “My Boyfriend’s Back” in 1963 becomes an ironclad diagnosis of incipient idiocy. We are a self-involved generation. Time to gorge, I'm told, on antioxidants. I wrote to an English friend, a poet who is close to my age: “I've noticed I've been making small mistakes with greater frequency of late -- forgetting names, not noticing typos, etc.” He replied:
“Well, if
you are deteriorating mentally so am I, the most frightening thing of all my
forgetting how to spell words. I also have what I call Small Word Blindness. I
either forget to put them in or I don’t notice their absence. My proof-reading
has never been good in any case.”
I’ve always
had a reliable memory. Remembering things, especially dates, came easily. It’s
reassuring to remember there’s nothing new about anxiety over memory loss. Listen
to the poet Samuel “Breakfast” Rogers (Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers, 1856):
“[Samuel] Boddington had a wretchedly bad memory; and, in order to improve it, he attended [Gregorvon] Feinaigle’s lectures on the Art of Memory. Soon after, some-body asked
Boddington the name of the lecturer and, for his life, he could not recollect
it. — When I was asked if I had attended the said lectures on the Art of
Memory, I replied, ‘No, I wished to learn the Art of Forgetting.’”
Like most
writers (like most human beings), Rogers has been largely forgotten. He was a
witty fellow, good company, known for the breakfasts he held in his London home, attended by such luminaries as Scott, Byron and Turner. During his lifetime,
Rogers’ best-known work was probably The Pleasures of Memory, with Other Poems (1802). At it’s heart, the long poem
is a celebration of nostalgia:
“Hail,
Memory, hail! in thy exhaustless mine
From age to
age unnumber’d treasures shine!”
Rogers was born on this date, July 30, in 1763 and died in 1855 at age ninety-two.
“I have a good memory, but it’s short.”
ReplyDeleteMontaigne (I forget in which essay, of course) claims to have the weak memory that I do in fact have at 36. Perhaps the upside may be that I will feel less anxious about a deteriorating memory in my 60s (if I make it so far--*touch wood*) when I have such a lousy faculty to begin with.
ReplyDeleteI'm discovering that having the license to unashamedly remember things as I would like to remember them is a real treat.
ReplyDelete