Ragged and Jagged Memory

I don’t trust memories.  Especially now that I’ve reached, officially, senior citizen-hood.  And as my recent unsuccessful bout with the study of Latin confirms, my memory ain’t what it used to be.  But then memory seldom was what it used to be, even when I was younger. 

My brother Ken and I have swapped stories about growing up.  And the tales are wildly different.  In many cases I have no recollection of the events he relates, and he looks with surprise at the tales I tell.  Were we both really there?  And then I remember my mother telling stories about our youth.  Most of the time, I looked at her with perplexity: that didn’t happen, Mom; or, that’s not the way it happened.  But she was as convinced of the truth of her memories as I was of the truth of mine.

The brain is not a computer, easily rebooted.  It is a filter, one which sorts, retains, and loses whatever it chooses, mostly without one’s input (to continue the computer analogy).  Computers are, in fact, way more reliable and can actually be rebooted.  The brain, not so much.  I suppose with years of counseling with a psychologist, one can dredge up something forgotten or misremembered, but for most of us that’s not an option.

And I’m not entirely sure that such a mental reboot would even be something to value.  Generally, I like my memories, and if I unconsciously censored them over the years, then there’s probably a reason for it.  I may not know what that reason is, but that doesn’t mean the censoring is a bad thing; it probably means just the opposite: something is best forgotten.

Which is not to say the aging brain doesn’t cause problems.  I have gotten especially bad with names.  I’ll be discussing authors with someone, as I used to do with my students, and say something like, “That reminds me of one of my favorite poets, . . . uh . . .”  And it’s not there.  It may be Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman, poets I know well, but the name is not ready to hand; it’s there, I can sense it, it’s on, as they say, the tip of my tongue, but I can’t pull it into consciousness.  That’s frustrating and on occasion embarrassing.  And I used to panic when it happened: can Alzheimer’s be far behind?  But a little research convinced me it’s a normal part of aging, and I now just laugh about it.  As I once heard, if you forget where your keys are, not to worry; if you forget what your keys are for, then you worry.

I’ll end with a favorite poem by Billy Collins (yea, I remembered the author!), the brilliantly funny and poignant “Forgetfulness”:

The name of the author is the first to go


followed obediently by the title, the plot,


the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel


which suddenly becomes one you have never read,


never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor


decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,


to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye


and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,


and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,


the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,


it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,


not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river


whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,


well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those


who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night


to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.

No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted


out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Cervus lux in lucerna.

Sometimes I think I am suffering from insanity.  Maybe it’s dementia?  Whatever it is, in a moment of madness that I fear will haunt me the next ten weeks, I signed up for a Latin class.  It was offered through the same branch of the University of Chicago as the Great Books program I’m just finishing up, so I thought what the hell.  I took two years in high school.  Surely some of that will come back?

Nope.  Nothing.  Nada.  Nihilo.  Other than the vaguely familiar terms such as “dative case” and “ablative case” nothing remains.  And only the terms remain; there’s nothing anywhere in my scrambled brain about what they mean, how they are used, and just what the heck to do with them.

I found that out yesterday in the first class.  I had worked hours--and I’m not exaggerating--to make flash cards for vocabulary and major concepts such as declensions, conjugations, and word order, and I labored over translations trying to get everything exactly right.  I wasn’t even close in some cases, and in others I had the wrong declension or conjugation and had something being done to someone when he or she should have been being done to.  Or something like that.  Two and a half hours of class and I was totally befuddled.  I had misunderstood several key concepts (there’s a “second conjugation”?) and once we started class the vocabulary left for parts unknown.  It was not a good day.

But I’m sticking it out.  I’m going back and rereading the early parts, sorting out all those cases and declensions and whatnot and, in two weeks when I return to class, maybe I’ll have a firmer grasp.  And yes, I have to miss next week’s class (it only meets once a week) for a family wedding (don’t get me started on that!) which is not going to help me with Latin one little bit.

Fortunately, I keep my liquor cabinet stocked.  Oh, and don’t bother going to Google Translate; the title above means “Deer in the headlights,” or, actually, lamplight, since the Romans didn’t have cars.  At least I pretty sure about that.

[Update: I gave the Latin class up.  I had high hopes.  But I just couldn’t manage to retain vocabulary--nor syntax nor inflections nor much of anything else.  Although I drilled (for vocabulary, I made flash cards) over and over, I would find that I couldn’t remember translations of words from chapter 1, even though I was working on chapter 6.  And all the declensions and conjugations never organized themselves in my brain with anything resembling coherence.  I was disappointed, but I did recognize that I was working way too hard for far too little reward.  Even after some much appreciated encouragement from Michaelangelo, the instructor, I just couldn’t justify continuing.  And he’s one of the best teachers in the program, one I’ve had several times in the past; I regretted my failure for fear that he would see it as a failure on his part.  It wasn’t.  I take all the blame for biting off way more than I could mentally chew.  I suppose ancient Greek is out . . .  ]