Borges was right: the perils of Funes
The laconic, elegant, deeply intellectual, and labyrinthine Jorge Luis Borges is one of my favorite authors, and “Funes, the Memorius” from his collection Ficciones is one of his best stories.
Borges had a swell of popularity in the 60s. I have no idea whether college students read him now as often as they did then, but I think they should. In “Funes,” Borges posits the existence of a young man who, as the result of a head injury, suddenly and spectacularly remembers everything.
But perhaps “remembers” isn’t quite the right word. He actually perceives everything with equal clarity and importance, and then remembers it. The problem is that Funes lacks a filter, and without one he can hardly live; he’s immobilized by his own receptivity to the confusion of the blooming, buzzing world (read the story to see how it all turns out).
And now the New York Times reports on research that backs up what Borges intuitively sensed:
…forgetting is also a blessing, and researchers reported on Sunday that the ability to block certain memories reduces the demands on the brain when it is trying to recall something important.
So it appears that in order to remember we must forget, and that this “pruning” sharpens focus. The problem, of course, is that we aren’t necessarily all that efficient in choosing when to hit the “delete” button and when to “save” (if in fact it’s a conscious choice at all). But, as the article points out, the knowledge that judicious forgetting can be helpful might be somewhat of a comfort to us as we age and have more trouble remembering things such as phone numbers and even names.
That is, if we can remember the article.
Focus is not the same as amount of knowledge. I agree with that philosophical axiom.
It is a simple concept. 600 pounds applied in a 2 cm square has different effects than 1,200,000 pounds applied in a 2 km square.
A person can recall with clarity every event in his or her life of 100 years. But is that the same as combining the strength and determination shown in those memories into one single moment of clarity? No.
Some things just don’t scale. Sometimes it is better to live in the moment and to solve the problems in the here and now. And other times it is better to plan ahead.
Not much else to say without reading the story.
WOW Ymarsakar!! You be so smart!! 🙂
This relates to something which occasionally bothers me about the information technology business — the conflation of different types of information. I recall once seeing a NASA press release bragging that the Mars planetary surveyor was sending back ten times (or maybe it was a hundred times) as much information as the Encyclopedia Brittannica. Of course, if one of the sentences in Brittannica is, “Mars has many features showing evidence of water” then that conveys as much _useful_ information as the billions of bits relayed by the probe.
A Funes-style memory is full of bits but never distils them into real _information_. (Which, of course, Borges points out himself in the story, in his description of Funes’s private and completely useless numbering system in which each number has its own particular name.)
Too bad you couldn’t find a way to make Borges story criticize the left. Literature, unfortunately, rules out most Americans who like their pleasures simple, visual, and divided into Good guys (who never make a mistake but are brought down by the teason of the left) and bad guys (who bear a distinct resemblance to Hillary Clinton, only in a toga, Nazi uniform, whatever).
I Loved this post and Trimegistus reply. 9-11 changed everything and I bet the person who wrote this blog wasn’t so self righteous or famous before the Towers Fell. I bet the person who writes this blog was literate and funny.
What do we few, we happy few, we band of brother Borges readers think of Garden of The Forking Paths. I always try to teach that to college students today and I cannot for the life of me understand why they do not find Borges more interesting than Harry Potter.
Labyrinthine elegance lives……
Information after all must inform. Data can be larger, but it is not as dense so to speak.
The internet has a lot of data, but it takes search engines and blogs to distill that data down to some information that people may use.
Yes, Borges was right. There is documented history about one exeptional person, Russian man Shereshevsky, who never forget anything. Famous Russian psychologist Luria wrote a book about him named “A Little Book about Big Memory”. This is a case study, Shereshevsky was his patient. But he never has proplems with focusing – his problem was inability to get rid of emotionally traumatic memories, and also spurious associations: he has rare quality of synesthesia, that is mixing of visual, acoustic and olfactory inputs. Colours for him has musical tones, letters have textures and smells, and so on. He remembered to the tiniest details all days of his life, weather conditions, texts up to typographic misprints read 30 years ago, and so on.
Another man with such unusial mental powers was a Russian writer, author of “Lolita” Vladimir Nabokov. He too has synesthesic reception, and to him every number and letter of alphabet also has individual colour, texture and musical tone. At least some days of his early childhood he remembered with unusial detail, clarity and vigour of sensual imagery (what is called edeitism). I also heard analogous stories about Leo Tolstoy from my family elder friends, who had close contacts with him; but I can’t affirm their stories, because they were fanatical Tolstoy admirers and tended to idolize him.
Tolstoy also writes in his authobiographical notes on his rememberance of how he was born – not only all the environment of the room, but also his sensations of the delivery itself. My own first rememberance does not runs so close to the begining, but I do remember very clear how I was weighted after being brought from the clinic to the flat of our family doctor. It was cold being sripped of swaddling bands and put on scales platform, white and cold metal trough, and I was frightened when it begin to rock to and fro under me.
I think the same principle can be applied to our collective/societal memory. There is so much information, (much of it inane, inaccurate, or contradictory) assaulting the public senses in our 24/7 cable news/internet world of today, that it can be overwhelming to the point of paralysis. It may well be a signifcant contibutor to the fractured and hysterical public conversation (if it can be called that) we are having at present.
Sergey: Speak, Memory, by Nabokov, is where I recall Nabokov describing that. Another great favorite of mine.
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