Here’s another old (2010) essay I saved from the NYT by novelist James Collins (Beginner’s GreekI) who asks “What’s the point of reading so many books when I can barely remember what’s in them?” And I guess the corollary to that question is the complaint of many readers who begin to read—usually a mystery—only to realize that they’ve read it before. If you do that, are you actually conscious when you read it the first time? I was thinking about this the other day when I discovered I couldn’t remember The Goldfinch, at least not from the trailers advertising the movie based on it. I liked the book so where was I when I was reading it? i was there-here-wherever.
Collins went for help to answer his question, consulting a professor of Child Development at Tufts University, Maryanne Wolf. She reassured him that a recent book he had read and enjoyed but couldn’t seem to remember had nevertheless had an effect on him. She said he was a different person for having read it, and she used that phrase i used for my blog title: reading, she said, creates pathways in the brain. She said there is a difference between the immediate recall of details and the ability to recall a “gestalt of knowledge”. To adapt a phrase of William James’s, there is a “wraith of memory”. “It’s there,”Wolf said. “You [we] are the sum of it all.” Of course! It’s from the poem, Ulysses, by Lord Tennyson:
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world ///whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.///
Oops—here’s a detour on my pathway. I have quoted those lines recently but after untravell’d world I continued “from whose bourne no traveller returns”. That, of course, is from Hamlet’s soliloquy that begins “to be or not to be.” Oh dear.
It’s gone to print. I made this egregious error in my new book, even now on its way to public scrutiny. You can be the first to reprimand this careless writer. She was haunted by a wraith of memory.