Dear Feltri,
The average person wastes about forty days a year trying to remember things they forget. Every day that passes, there are more things to remember: names, passwords, appointments. We are bombarded with new information, but our brains can only retain a fraction of it: memory has always been important, and training it should be considered character-building. With the advent of printing, it became less and less important to remember what the printed page could remember instead of human memory. In the past, memory was the foundation of culture, but it has gradually been supplanted by an infinite number of external media. If memory is the means by which we preserve what we consider precious, it is tied to our transience. Our memories die with us: the elaborate system of external memories is a way to elude mortality. Once upon a time, we tried to fill our minds with data, today the vast majority trust their memory little or not at all and find an infinite number of shortcuts in order to avoid having to resort to it, but no external memory has ever produced a joke, an invention, an intuition or a work of art that lasts over time. Schools inculcate enormous quantities of information into the heads of students without teaching them how to retain it. The brain is a muscle and mnemonic training is a form of mental training: according to the orators of ancient Rome it was an ideal tool for developing new ideas. In an age in which the role of memory is increasingly losing value, we must cultivate our ability to remember. It is our memories, the ability to grasp the ironic side of life, to establish connections between separate concepts that make us what we are, the seat of our values and the source of our personality.
Mauro July
Dear Mauro,
I really appreciated your reflections on memory and, in particular, the fundamental concept that you express and that I allow myself to summarize in this way: external memory gives us the illusion perhaps of being able to escape death, or the illusion of immortality, because what it incorporates remains, but, in truth, only that which is born from the effort of memory, which cannot be taken away from us, is and remains eternal, like a work of art, a book, a piece of music, something that originates from the ingenuity and creativity of the human being, therefore from the latter’s ability to put together memories, or the memories of his experiences. We are convinced that everything that is artificial is somehow better, but are we really sure? It’s true, we store and archive a lot of data, let’s say infinite, in our computers, cell phones, smartphones, tablets, but sometimes I have the impression that this mass of information is not so safe. It would take nothing to erase everything, a simple click, a global blackout. And what would be left for us?
Only what is written, jotted down on a sheet of paper, can last. I discover this when I find old newspaper pages in my drawers, or postcards, or letters, or notes, or photographs, not the digital ones that are made in abundance nowadays and for the simple pleasure of appearing, things stored and forgotten there for years, or decades, yet ready to resurface from the depths of memory, making us shudder and palpitate. Meanwhile, the messages that arrive on our cell phones as well as emails join a shapeless mass of sterile and empty communications, of which no trace will remain either in our minds or in our hearts.
In short, what is really destined to last? What we memorize, what we immortalize and print in our memory, you would say. You are not entirely wrong, I remember poems learned in elementary school, proverbs, Latin mottos and similar stuff, that teachers once forced us to fix in our heads, doing us good, as that mental training made us more inclined to memorize, as you claim. However, the answer would be insufficient, incomplete, not exhaustive.
After more than eighty years of life I can say that it is destined to last and survive even in our memory, which is selective and throws away the useless, only what has moved us, for better or for worse. A smile, a look, a sentence, two hands clasping in the back seat of a car, a special day spent with someone important to us, or one spent in the company of ourselves in which we understood something important, moments of happiness, the birth of a child, the death of a loved one, a victory, a defeat, a kiss, the first, the last, a pain or a disappointment that broke and tore our heart, what then made it beat again, stronger than before, the falls, that moment in which we got up and the one in which we made it, once again, despite the difficulties. Everything else is lost. Everything else doesn’t count that much.
Everything else doesn’t last.
Perhaps there is a memory of the brain. And then there is a memory of the soul, even more resistant. And no artificial intelligence will ever be able to replace or supplant it. Data is lost. Emotions remain.