14 - “In Football Season,” “First Wives and Trolley Cars,” “The Day of the Dying Rabbit,” “Leaving Church Early,” and “The Egg Race”

Summary

MOST PEOPLE PROBABLY THINK of memory more or less the way Plato describes it in the Theaetetus (ca. 369 B.C.E.). Socrates paints the picture for the titular mathematician:

Let us make in each soul a sort of aviary of all kinds of birds; some in flocks separate from the others, some in small groups, and others flying about singly here and there among all the rest…. Then we must say that when we are children this receptacle is empty; and by the birds we must understand pieces of knowledge. When anyone takes possession of a piece of knowledge and shuts it up in the pen, we should say that he has learned or has found out the thing of which this is the knowledge; and knowing, we should say, is this.

A given act of memory, then, involves a person's reaching into the aviary and trying to pull out the bird that corresponds to the fact or concept or event that she or he wants to remember. Some birds resist being pulled out, of course, and so people cannot always remember the things they want to remember; other times, they will misremember by pulling the wrong bird out of the aviary. But the overall image, perhaps, corresponds to our experience of memory (or at least to our interpretation of our experience of memory): memories are abstract objects that we retrieve from our minds more or less intact. To use a more up-to-date analogy, we might think of memory working “the way a computer works: you use some sort of search cue (a time, a key word, a title) and find the memory waiting in some corner of the brain, in somewhat the way you might use a word to search for a document in your computer files.” The popular notion of a “photographic memory” says much the same thing using different imagery: The miraculous rememberer, we are told, can look at a scene and instantly memorize every single detail of it, perfectly recalling it later (often on the command of a television detective). Most of us, it is admitted, do not have this level of recall—but it is merely an extreme version of the process we all undergo in our every act of remembering.