I remember that I loved it, but not why

Below is an excerpt from an article by James Collins in The New York Times about not being able to remember what he reads.  He describes exactly my never-ending frustration with my memory.  I remember that I loved (or not) a book, but that’s it.  Emotional recall, but no specifics of plot or theme, let alone details like form and imagery, or the ever-enviable ability to quote from memory.  It is why I annotate so heavily when I read.  I must leave a trace of myself on my books, since they will not leave enough traces of themselves on me.

I called Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts University and the author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.” I described my “Perjury” problem — I was interested in the subject and engrossed in the book for days, but now remember nothing about it — and asked her if reading it had ultimately had any effect on me.

“I totally believe that you are a different person for having read that book,” Wolf replied. “I say that as a neuroscientist and an old literature major.”

She went on to describe how reading creates pathways in the brain, strengthening different mental processes. Then she talked about content.

“There is a difference,” she said, “between immediate recall of facts and an ability to recall a gestalt of knowledge. We can’t retrieve the specifics, but to adapt a phrase of William James’s, there is a wraith of memory. The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it.”

“Gestalt knowledge.”  I like that.  It sounds much more sophisticated than my own mental image of all the lost details from my books as crumbs swept under the carpet.  Instead of a secret and shameful forgetting, I can learn to think of this disappearance as a shoring up of unconscious knowledge.  Cold comfort, even with a beautiful name like “wraith of memory.”

Gestalt knowledge is also what was at work in the push to put the great books onto university calendars and into middle class homes.  There was a hope that the books that formed the gestalt of western civilization could be made more than the collective unconscious.

Great Books or great books, I live with the hope of being able to remember them better. 

Thank you, blog, for giving solid form to at least some of my wraiths of memory.