Book of the Month

Shuts and Failures

by Michael Maiello

Speak, Memory

by artappraiser 2/1/2013 - 10:45 pm

By Oliver Sacks, New York Review of Books, Feb. 21, 2013 issue

In 1993, approaching my sixtieth birthday, I started to experience a curious phenomenon—the spontaneous, unsolicited rising of early memories into my mind, memories that had lain dormant for upward of fifty years. Not merely memories, but frames of mind, thoughts, atmospheres, and passions associated with them—memories, especially, of my boyhood in London before World War II.  Moved by these, I wrote two short memoirs, [.....]

I expected some deficiencies of memory—partly because the events I was writing about had occurred fifty or more years earlier, and most of those who might have shared their memories, or checked my facts, were now dead; and partly because, in writing about the first fifteen years of my life, I could not call on the letters and notebooks that I started to keep, assiduously, from the age of eighteen or so.

I accepted that I must have forgotten or lost a great deal, but assumed that the memories I did have—especially those that were very vivid, concrete, and circumstantial—were essentially valid and reliable; and it was a shock to me when I found that some of them were not.[.....]

Read the full article at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/21/speak-memory/

Great link.  I especially liked his conclusion:

Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge. This sort of sharing and participation, this communion, would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified, seen as private, exclusively ours. Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.

An excellent argument against copyrights.  

by EmmaZahn 2/2/2013 - 8:54 am

Wonderful.  This is why I tend to devour everything Oliver Sacks has to say.  Whatever it is, it's just rich with story-telling and revelations and things I can almost always relate to.  (I'm weird that way.)

I've been caught by relatives many times recounting my version of a story that is far different from theirs.  As I'm telling it I believe with my whole heart and soul that that's the way it happened.  I can see it.  But if enough of them say it isn't so, it just isn't so.

When I was a columnist for a group of newspapers in suburban Detroit I wrote a column about kids and barns and in it I talked about watching Old Man Kilpela milk a cow, now and then squirting the milk toward the cat, who caught it in midair.  I talked about the old man's hunched shoulders and veined hands and thinning white hair.  I could see him as clearly at my desk as I had seen him through the barn door those many years ago.  Except I never saw him.  When my mother read my column she called me and said, "I don't know who you saw in that barn but it wasn't Old Man Kilpela.  He went into the woods and shot himself long before you were born." (Another one of those deep, dark secrets only dragged out as needed.)

She went on to tell me that there hadn't been an old man in that barn since then and that it might have been Mrs. Kilpela, since she usually milked the cows (and was old).  But I'm still seeing that old man.

Which is why I can both sympathize with and be terrified of unintentional plagiarism.  The only thing that saves me, I think, is my inability to memorize complete sentences.

by Ramona 2/2/2013 - 11:32 am

Emma and Ramona: appreciate hearing from others who appreciate Oliver as much as I do.

by artappraiser 2/3/2013 - 1:46 pm

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