X-Message-Number: 19774 Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2002 21:13:48 -0400 From: Robin Helweg-Larsen <> Subject: Borges on memory I thought I'd pass this passage along, because I read some very similar science recently - but, given that Borges was born in 1899, his father's ideas are in the region of 100 years old: Borges: 'I remember my father said to me something about memory, a very saddening thing. He said, "I thought I could recall my childhood when we first came to Buenos Aires, but now I know that I can't." I said, "Why?" He said, "Because I think that memory" - I don't know if this was his own theory, I was so impressed by it that I didn't ask him whether he found it or whether he evolved it - but he said, "I think that if I recall something, so example, if today I look back on this morning, then I get an image of what I saw this morning. But if tonight, I'm thinking back on this morning, then I'm really recalling not the first image, but the first image in memory. So that every time I recall something, I'm not recalling it really, I'm recalling the last time I recalled it. So that really," he said, "I have no memories whatever, I have no images whatever, about my childhood, about my youth (...) And as in every memory there's a slight distortion, I don't suppose that my memory of today ties in with the first images I had," so that, he said, "I try not to think of things in the past because if I do I'll be thinking back on those memories and not on the actual images themselves." And then that saddened me. To think maybe we have no true memories of youth.' Burgin: 'That the past was invented, fictitious.' Borges: 'That it can be distorted by successive repetition. Because if in every repetition you get a slight distortion, then in the end you will be a long way off from the issue. It's a saddening thought. I wonder if it's true, I wonder what other psychologists would have to say about that.' - Richard Burgin, 'Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges', Holt, Rinehart & Winston 1969, Avon Books 1970 pp 26-27 Robin HL. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=19774