In Praise of Memorization

Dear Readers,

I’d like to talk about memorization, and promulgate the merits thereof.

A Brief History and Commentary on my Personal Experiences with Memorization

I’ve had a lot of experience with memorization in my life. I’ve memorized lots and lots of lines for plays I’ve been in. I’ve memorized lots and lots of scriptures and religious stuff during my upbringing and during my mission.

Yep, I’ve memorized a whole lot of stuff. But I’ve forgotten a lot of it. I’d estimate I can currently recite about 1% of all the scripture and dramatic material I’ve ever memorized. Maybe it’s less than 1%. But if I included all the phone numbers I’ve memorized, all the stuff I’ve memorized for tests, that percentage- and this is a horrible estimation- would go down to maybe .001%

I mean really, I’ve memorized so much stuff verbatim in my 19 years of formal education, so many vocabulary words, so many facts that I cannot now recall… it’s wild to think about all the information that has entered and left my brain. Here’s a partial list of stuff I can't remember anymore:

-The fifty U.S. states and their capitols

-A whole bunch of Spanish words (I had to take Spanish for three lousy semesters to get my degree.)

-The quadratic equation

-The names of most of the original 150 Pokemon

-The name of Atreyu’s horse in The NeverEnding Story (Oh wait I remember that one: Artex! Artex, Artex, you can’t leave me Artex! You’ve got to fight it! Give me a name, Bastion. If you don’t give me a name, then Fantasia will disappear- and so will I! Why don’t you do what you dream, Bastion? Ha ha ha.)

-Other stuff I can’t remember

But I still think all that memorization was good for me. Memorization has kept my brain active, kind of like doing crossword puzzles or playing Suduko keeps brains active. Memorization also helped me to more fully appreciate literature. But maybe the best thing about memorization is that has it turned me into a deeper vessel of a wonderful wonderful culture.

One of my favorite things to memorize is poetry. I have “Love is Not All: It is Not Meat Nor Drink” memorized- that’s a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay. It’d be cool if I memorized the Raven by Edgar Allan Poe or Pioneers O Pioneers by Walt Whitman, or um… that wonderful Shylock speech in The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare copied from the bounteous mysterious Internet and pasted here

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs,dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed withthe same food, hurt with the same weapons, subjectto the same diseases, heal'd by the same means,warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summeras a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us,do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility?Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should hissufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge.The villainy you teach me, I will execute,and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

Isn’t that great? Don’t you think you should memorize it?

By the way, here’s a great poem about memory by Billy Collins:

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19754

I think I should memorize more poetry/Shakespeare because that stuff has actually stuck with me for years, while prose seems to drift away. I can recite the prologue to Henry V any time you want. And I can recite a lot of the Hamlet monologue that starts, “O that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw, or resolve itself into a dew...”

There’s something magical about iambic pentameter and rhyming, rhythmic stuff that makes it easy to remember. Prose, on the other hand, seems to leave my head quicker.

Is Memorization of Literature Outdated?

Throughout history, people have passed down culture through memorization. Think of Beowulf. And the Odyessy and the Illiad. Those epic poems about national identity were passed down orally for a long time before they were written down. Those epic poems were really really long, but people memorized them anyway.

(By the way, check out this cool video of Benjamin Bagby, a nerd/cool guy who memorized Beowulf in Old English and who performs it like a scop in a mead hall. It's really awesome. A viewing of this video might promulgate the merits of memorization more than this blog post could.)



And before the ease of printing and publication and distribution via modern technology, I bet people memorized songs and poetry a lot more than people do now.

But with all our modern technology, some might argue that memorization is outdated. We have the Internet now. Why memorize literature and poems if you can just Google them?

Written documents are so much more reliable than our memories. And thank goodness for written documents. I often refer to reference books when I want to be sure that I’m remembering something correctly. And maybe that reliance on books and the Internet has made my brain lazier- I’ve thought that I don’t really need to know stuff- recipes, names of places and books and policies and procedures- I can just look everything up.

But my answer is no, memorization is not outdated. There is something special about memorization. In fact, I think memorization is more needed than ever, because to memorize something, you must first ask "what literature is worth memorizing?" After all, memorizing something takes a lot of effort, and you couldn't memorize everything, nor should you. To be a person who memorizes literature, you have to seek out and identify the good, the true, and the beautiful.

And you have to recognize the bad, the false, and the ugly, and you have to shun that stuff and get away from it as much as possible.

Before you memorize something, you have to discriminate literature worth memorizing from literature that would be worthless, or even harmful to memorize. Because you don’t flip to any random page of a book or a magazine and say, “I think I’ll memorize this paragraph.” No, people generally memorize stuff that a large group of people agree is worth memorizing.

When you memorize the Lord’s Prayer, or the Pledge of Allegiance, you’re saying that those collections of words are more important than other collection of words. You’re saying that the Lord’s Prayer is more worthwhile and has more lasting value than, say, a transcript of the nightly news broadcast. A culture that makes its young memorize certain things (whether it be pages of the Torah, Catholic catechism, the 13 Articles of Faith, the Gettysburg Address) is a culture which makes a judgment call. A culture that makes its young memorize certain things is being discriminatory, and that’s a good thing.

I recently watched this wonderful video of Evan Sayet, a conservative Jewish comedian and pundit. In this video Mr. Sayet says that the main tenet of modern liberalism is that you can’t discriminate at all, between races, genders, cultures, religion... see, this sounds good so far, but non-discrimination in its broad sense leads to the feeling that nothing is worth fighting for, everything must be equally respected, and to get everything equaly respected, you have to tear down the guy/culture/ religion that's on top. He says this ethic of non-discrimination is so widespread in liberalism that it goes all the way from art galleries to political policies. It’s really long, but it’s really good.






To sum up...

Memorization is Great Because…

1] It exercises the brain.

2] It requires discrimination between the good, the true, and the beautiful from the bad, false, and ugly.

3] The things you memorize are always with you, because your brain is always with you, and encyclopedias and the Internet are not always with you (at least I hope they aren’t always with you.)

4] The person who memorizes becomes a vessel of culture.

Let's go memorize something!

Sincerely,
Telemoonfa