'Capricious and Leaking'

“[T]here is, perhaps, a special pleasure in re-learning the names of many of the flowers every spring. It is like re-reading a book that one has almost forgotten. 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 Irish critic Robert Lynd (1879-1949) is writing in the title essay of his 1921 collection The Pleasures of Ignorance. Naturally, I couldn’t remember which essay by Montaigne he cited but logically enough I found the passage in “Of Books”:

 

“To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before and scribbled over with my notes, I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book (I mean of those that I intend to use only once) the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole . . .”

I had a similar experience recently when looking up something I had written on Anecdotal Evidence eighteen years ago. I quickly found it but in the same post I referred to another book I have no recollection of having read. The title and even the author’s name are blanks in memory. Lynd would understand:

“I have myself a capricious and leaking memory. I can read Hamlet itself and The Pickwick Papers as though they were the work of new authors and had come wet from the press, so much of them fades between one reading and another.”

 Even serious readers and rereaders, at least those not cursed with photographic memories, must concede that we’re left with general impressions of books in memory, not transcripts. I’ve read Conrad’s Nostromo twice but just the other day I had to search a digital version to confirm the precise wording of a passage I incompletely remembered.

 

“With a bad memory,” Lynd writes, “one can go on reading Plutarch and The Arabian Nights all one's life. Little shreds and tags, it is probable, will stick even in the worst memory, just as a succession of sheep cannot leap through a gap in a hedge without leaving a few wisps of wool on the thorns. But the sheep themselves escape, and the great authors leap in the same way out of an idle memory and leave little enough behind.”

 

In On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press, 2024), Theodore Dalrymple calls Lynd “a distinguished essayist” and says his work is “very un-strident in tone” for a man so heavily involved in Irish politics. Rather, his essays are “those of an amused, sceptical observer of the follies of mankind, as well as a recorder of the small pleasures of existence.”

 

[The Montaigne passage is from the translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne by Donald Frame (Stanford University Press, 1957).]