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.

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