A Few Words Of Explanation

Memory

It’s a commonplace that these days many of us are outsourcing the functions of memory. Who makes the effort to remember phone numbers when they can be stored on the phone you use to make your calls? Some go further and suggest that human memory is a faculty that has been superseded, that being able to access information is equivalent to having knowledge of that information. I can’t agree with that. Memory is the fundamental tool that enables us to reason and to understand. It is the mental equivalent of the practice and repetition that allows a carpenter to make a joint that fits perfectly. It is what ingrains knowledge so deeply as to operate on the level of intuition. If we allow this faculty to wither, we reduce ourselves to the status of imbeciles or children, lost in wonder at the endless stream of our perceptions but unable to operate on them. The tags that adorn blog posts are a crude approximation of the rich network of associations that constitute our experience of cognition. To commit verses to memory, to recall the succession of kings, to grasp the axioms of mathematics, these are not the idle formalities of school examinations. This is the training that allows us to act as citizens, to discriminate between logic and persiflage, to engage with culture.

The Colour Of Memory

The Colour Of Memory is a novel by Geoff Dyer, about a group of friends living on the dole in Brixton in the early 1980s.