For those early writers, a trained memory wasn’t just about gaining easy access to information. It was about strengthening ones personal ethics and becoming a more complete person. A trained memory was the key to cultivating judgement, citizenship and piety. What one memorized helped shape ones character. Just as the secret to becoming a chess grandmaster was to learn old games, the secret to becoming a grandmaster of life was to learn old texts. In a tight spot, where could one look for guidance about how to act if not the depths of memory?

Mere reading is not necessarily learning. A fact that I am personally confronted with every time I try to remember the contents of a book I’ve just put down. To really learn a text, one had to memorize it. As the early 18th Century Dutch poet Jan Luyken put it, “One book, printed in the hearts own wax, is worth a thousand in the stacks.”

The ancient and medieval way of reading was totally different from how we read today. One didn’t just memorize texts, one ruminated on them, chewed them up and regurgitated them like cud. And in the process, became intimate with them in a way that made them ones own. As Petrarch said in a letter to a friend, “I ate in the morning what I would digest in the evening. I swallowed as a boy what I would ruminate upon as an older man. I have thoroughly absorbed these writings, and planting them not only in my memory, but in my marrow.” Augustine was said to be so steeped in the Psalms that they, as much as Latin itself, comprised the principle language in which he wrote.

Another excerpt from Joshua Foer’s book Moonwalking with Einstein.

Painting above by Ian Carpenter, Brooklyn NY

Tags:augustineIan CarpenterJoshua FoerlearningmemoryMoonwalking with EinsteinPoetry