and boundless inner hall.’”
She gets up to take the macaroni out of the oven, fills two bowls, and hands me a fork. “Eat.”
I know in my mind it’s delicious—the same macaroni and cheese I would have dropped everything for just a week ago—but now it seems to have no taste, and I struggle to get it down.
“You’ve lost weight,” Nell says, spooning more macaroni into my already full bowl. “I know food’s the last thing on your mind, but you can’t run on empty.”
She finishes her own bowl, then goes to her bookshelves. “Memory is a science,” she says, rummaging through the titles. “Gobs of stuff have been written about it.”
Within minutes the kitchen table is piled high with books and file folders. There are books about how the brain stores information, photocopied articles on memory retrieval, writings on the art of mnemonics by Aristotle, Raymond Lull, and Robert Fludd.
“You’ve just got all this stuff lying around?”
Nell shrugs. “Once a librarian, always a librarian.” She flips through the books, marking a few pages with Post-it notes, showing me diagrams of the brain—the elegantly curved hippocampus, the almond-shaped amygdala, the mysterious temporal lobe. “It’s in here,” she says, tapping my head. “This is where you’ll find the answer. It’s well documented that traumatic or emotionally trying events wreak havoc with memory, so that information stored in the brain becomes very difficult to access. But the information is still there. You just have to figure out how to get to it.”
Late that night, sitting alone at my place with a pencil and notebook by my side, I delve into Nell’s books. In a recently published volume called
Strange Memory
, by a renowned professor of psychology named Stephen Perry, I come upon the story of Sherevsky, the man who could not forget. Perry references the classic work
The Mind of a Mnemonist
, wherein the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria refers to his patient Sherevsky simply as S. It strikes me as odd that a man with so many memories would be reduced to a single letter.
What did S. remember? Every word of every conversation, stretching back into childhood. Every meal he had eaten, every sound he had heard, every feature of every face he encountered. While amnesiacs have no ability to remember, S. suffered the impossibility of forgetting. Any page of text, any conversation, was a minefield; a single word would cause an avalanche of memories that made it impossible to complete his train of thought.
Imagine a street in any city, on any given day. Now, imagine that a walk down this street leads to thousands of permanent memories. For you, there is no such thing as the short term, no such thing as the forgettable. You will remember every storefront, every person standing behind the glass, each individual stance. Say this street is home to a bookshop. Walking past the shop, you glance in and see a few titles on display. Forever after, you will remember not only the titles, but also the covers of the books, the order in which they are arranged, the woman standing in line to make a purchase, the tilt of her head as she turns and sees you. You will remember the color of her lipstick, red, the shape of her leg, slim and long, lifted slightly, the black leather sandal sliding off her heel. You will remember, too, the man behind the cash register, his haircut, the gold watch he wears. You hurry on ahead, aware, as you do so, that in the previous seconds you have supplied your memory with thousands of impressions you will have to carry with you until you die. Walking, contemplating this truth, you stub your toe. You look down and see the culprit—a raised spot in the sidewalk. This, too, will be your memory: the imperfection in the sidewalk, the painful sensation in the toe, the image of your own shoe in motion. And you will not be able to forget the fact that, on that particular day of that particular year, in that exact location,
She gets up to take the macaroni out of the oven, fills two bowls, and hands me a fork. “Eat.”
I know in my mind it’s delicious—the same macaroni and cheese I would have dropped everything for just a week ago—but now it seems to have no taste, and I struggle to get it down.
“You’ve lost weight,” Nell says, spooning more macaroni into my already full bowl. “I know food’s the last thing on your mind, but you can’t run on empty.”
She finishes her own bowl, then goes to her bookshelves. “Memory is a science,” she says, rummaging through the titles. “Gobs of stuff have been written about it.”
Within minutes the kitchen table is piled high with books and file folders. There are books about how the brain stores information, photocopied articles on memory retrieval, writings on the art of mnemonics by Aristotle, Raymond Lull, and Robert Fludd.
“You’ve just got all this stuff lying around?”
Nell shrugs. “Once a librarian, always a librarian.” She flips through the books, marking a few pages with Post-it notes, showing me diagrams of the brain—the elegantly curved hippocampus, the almond-shaped amygdala, the mysterious temporal lobe. “It’s in here,” she says, tapping my head. “This is where you’ll find the answer. It’s well documented that traumatic or emotionally trying events wreak havoc with memory, so that information stored in the brain becomes very difficult to access. But the information is still there. You just have to figure out how to get to it.”
Late that night, sitting alone at my place with a pencil and notebook by my side, I delve into Nell’s books. In a recently published volume called
Strange Memory
, by a renowned professor of psychology named Stephen Perry, I come upon the story of Sherevsky, the man who could not forget. Perry references the classic work
The Mind of a Mnemonist
, wherein the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria refers to his patient Sherevsky simply as S. It strikes me as odd that a man with so many memories would be reduced to a single letter.
What did S. remember? Every word of every conversation, stretching back into childhood. Every meal he had eaten, every sound he had heard, every feature of every face he encountered. While amnesiacs have no ability to remember, S. suffered the impossibility of forgetting. Any page of text, any conversation, was a minefield; a single word would cause an avalanche of memories that made it impossible to complete his train of thought.
Imagine a street in any city, on any given day. Now, imagine that a walk down this street leads to thousands of permanent memories. For you, there is no such thing as the short term, no such thing as the forgettable. You will remember every storefront, every person standing behind the glass, each individual stance. Say this street is home to a bookshop. Walking past the shop, you glance in and see a few titles on display. Forever after, you will remember not only the titles, but also the covers of the books, the order in which they are arranged, the woman standing in line to make a purchase, the tilt of her head as she turns and sees you. You will remember the color of her lipstick, red, the shape of her leg, slim and long, lifted slightly, the black leather sandal sliding off her heel. You will remember, too, the man behind the cash register, his haircut, the gold watch he wears. You hurry on ahead, aware, as you do so, that in the previous seconds you have supplied your memory with thousands of impressions you will have to carry with you until you die. Walking, contemplating this truth, you stub your toe. You look down and see the culprit—a raised spot in the sidewalk. This, too, will be your memory: the imperfection in the sidewalk, the painful sensation in the toe, the image of your own shoe in motion. And you will not be able to forget the fact that, on that particular day of that particular year, in that exact location,
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