Memory
By: Charles Schifano
Tags: History, Life, Writing, Philosophy, Mind

Istanbul, 2017

Last week, during a conversation about languages, this paragraph came back to me:

“Home, they say, is where the heart is. I’m not so sure. I’ve had lots of homes and I don’t consider my heart to be attached very firmly to any of them. What is meant, of course, is that home is wherever you choose to place it — in which case I suppose I’ve always been homeless: many decades ago I left my heart on a Swiss mountainside, but the rest of me has foolishly failed to follow. Still, among my deracinated roots there is one that protrudes a little above the heap and may even constitute a grounding of sorts. From 1952 until 1958 my family lived in the southwest London district of Putney and I recall it with affection.”

Tony Judt is the writer, and that paragraph comes from his 2010 collection The Memory Chalet. There’s much to admire about the writing itself, which, before I leap too far ahead, I must at least mark: how he plays with two clichés, breaking one, accepting another; how he creates a melody of the word home, using it in triplicate before slapping the reader with homeless; how he dances from foolishly to failed to follow; how deracinated acts as the hinge for which the entire passage swings; his subtle ending, the choice of a noun with a Latin root, which reveals a sense of emotion yet keeps its distance, antithetical to the first instinct of most writers.

Yet those aren’t the reasons this paragraph came back to me. What happened, instead, is that a discussion of memory — in particular, on how to better recall vocabulary words in a foreign language — reminded me of Judt.

The Memory Chalet is a book that I’ve returned to several times over the years, partly for its poignant writing, a little for its cogent analysis of social themes, but primarily for something that’s a little more intangible.

“At the time of writing (May 2010) I have completed since the onset of my disease a small political book, a public lecture, some twenty feuilletons reflecting on my life, and a considerable body of interviews directed toward a full-scale study of the twentieth century. All of these rest on little more than nocturnal visits to my memory chalet and subsequent efforts to recapture in sequence and in detail the content of those visits. Some look inward — beginning with a house or a bus or a man; others look out, spanning decades of political observation and engagement and continents of travel, teaching, and commentary.”

A better description for The Memory Chalet is that it was dictated rather than written, as Judt had lost the ability to use a pen because of symptoms related to ALS. The memoir doesn’t, however, come across as gloomy, mawkish, or overwrought. His words always had a light touch without losing any thrust even when he wrote about grand events — his tome on Postwar Europe, most notably — and that lively pace persists in The Memory Chalet. His essay Words shows the root of that dexterity:

“I was raised on words. They tumbled off the kitchen table onto the floor where I sat: grandfather, uncles, and refugees flung Russian, Polish, Yiddish, French, and what passed for English at one another in a competitive cascade of assertion and interrogation.”

The essay meanders, encircling the subject of language — from his early German instruction, to a discussion on rhetoric, some thoughts about the false dichotomy between style and substance, before he ends, after a lifetime of words, “more conscious of these considerations now than at any time in the past.” His writing has become limited to dictating; any exploration of subjects is constrained by what he already knows.

Language acquisition can be envisioned as an expansive act: you’re attempting to augment what’s already on the hard drive. What’s conjured is an image of growth. Although it’s understandable that Judt’s nightly journeys into his past and feats of memory came back to me because of a conversation on memory, flipping through the pages once again was startling. At first glance, and in my recollection, he’s exploring memory, his associations, thoughts, revealing meditations on the page. But the subject is actually, in his state, more closely associated with forgetting than remembering.

“My latest writings have a far more inductive quality to them. Their value rests on an essentially impressionistic effect: the success with which I have related and interwoven the private and the public, the reasoned and the intuited, the recalled and the felt.”

A glib reading finds sadness in these short meditations. It’s easy to detect, as every page reveals the hard truth of his predicament. You can surely set the book down and walk away with that response, yet most readers discover, instead, a clear sense of consolation. So what makes the melancholic somehow redeeming?

“If you must suffer thus, better to have a well-stocked head: full of recyclable and multipurpose pieces of serviceable recollection, readily available to an analytically disposed mind.”

Nothing about his fate is comforting. Nothing about his position is defensible. But the vividness of his mediations — on Paris, marriage, Cambridge, political philosophy — comes across as an active, engaged state, an utter denial of pity, in a retelling that’s redemptive in its equanimity, in its relentless engagement, far beyond the norm.

His technique of using a Memory Palace, or Method of loci, dates to at least ancient Greece, and is still commonly used today. The basic method is to envision a space — a former home is common — and to associate what you need to remember with particular objects. By linking each memory item with a specific object, an emotional salience is more likely to occur, which helps you to solidify the new memory. I haven’t tried or really even considered the technique myself, though I find the mechanics of the method intriguing.

For readers of The Memory Chalet, however, Judt’s description of this technique reveals something else, an implicit yet quite clear lesson. He imparts each recollection with evident delight, leaving you with an abrupt understanding of how urgent it is to crowd the objects of your envisioned room.