A Part of All That I Read is Mine to Keep

I like to think that everything I read stays with me somehow even when I don't remember most of it.

Essay
The Plot Escapes Me
By JAMES COLLINS
Published: September 17, 2010

Those were glorious days, the ones I spent reading “Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case,” by Allen Weinstein. It is a book that I, having long had an interest in domestic Communist intrigues, had been meaning to read for years — decades — and I vividly remember that moment a couple of summers ago when, on my way to visit friends in New Hampshire, I found a hardcover copy in good condition at a restaurant-cum-used-book-store.

For the next few days, all I wanted to do was read “Perjury.” I tried to be a good sport about kayaking and fishing and roasting wieners with the kids, but I was always desperate to get back to Alger and Whittaker. The house where I was staying had been built on the edge of a lake, and I distinctly remember looking up from the book and seeing the sun sparkle on the clear, rippling water, then returning to the polluted gloom of the Case.

I remember it all, but there’s just one thing: I remember nothing about the book’s actual contents.

Before reading “Perjury,” I had an elementary understanding of the Hiss affair and the personalities involved; further, I knew that Hiss claimed to have known Chambers as “George Crosley.” Today, a couple of years after reading “Perjury,” I have an elementary understanding of the Hiss affair and the personalities involved; further, I know that Hiss claimed to have known Chambers as “George Crosley.” I have forgotten everything else. What was the point?

I have just realized something terrible about myself: I don’t remember the books I read. I chose “Perjury” as an example at random, and its neighbors on my bookshelf, Michael Chabon’s “Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” (on the right) and Anka Muhlstein’s “Taste for Freedom: The Life of Astolphe de Custine” (on the left), could have served just as well. These are books I loved, but as with “Perjury,” all I associate with them is an atmosphere and a stray image or two, like memories of trips I took as a child.

Nor do I think I am the only one with this problem. Certainly, there are those who can read a book once and retain everything that was in it, but anecdotal evidence suggests that is not the case with most people. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most people cannot recall the title or author or even the existence of a book they read a month ago, much less its contents.

So we in the forgetful majority must, I think, confront the following question: Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?

One answer is that we read for the aesthetic and literary pleasure we experience while reading. The pleasure — or intended pleasure — of novels is obvious, but it is no less true that we read nonfiction for the immediate satisfaction it provides. The acquisition of knowledge, while you are acquiring it, can be intensely engrossing and stimulating, and a well-constructed argument is a beautiful thing. But that kind of pleasure is transient. When we read a serious book, we want to learn something, we want it to change us, and it hardly seems possible for that to happen if its fugitive content passes through us like light through glass.

Now, with a terrible sense of foreboding, I slowly turn to look again at my bookshelf. There they all are, “Perjury” and “Kavalier & Clay” and those other books that I have read and of which I remember so little. And I have to ask myself, Would it have made no difference if I had never read any of them? Could I just as well have spent my time watching golf?

But this cannot be. Those books must have reshaped my brain in ways that affect how I think, and they must have left deposits of information with some sort of property — a kind of mental radiation — that continues to affect me even if I can’t detect it. Mustn’t they have?

To help answer this question I called Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts University and the author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.” I described my “Perjury” problem — I was interested in the subject and engrossed in the book for days, but now remember nothing about it — and asked her if reading it had ultimately had any effect on me.

“I totally believe that you are a different person for having read that book,” Wolf replied. “I say that as a neuroscientist and an old literature major.”

She went on to describe how reading creates pathways in the brain, strengthening different mental processes. Then she talked about content.

“There is a difference,” she said, “between immediate recall of facts and an ability to recall a gestalt of knowledge. We can’t retrieve the specifics, but to adapt a phrase of William James’s, there is a wraith of memory. The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it.”

Did this mean that it hadn’t been a waste of time to read all those books, even if I seemingly couldn’t remember what was in them?

“It’s there,” Wolf said. “You are the sum of it all.”

This was very encouraging, and it makes intuitive sense: we have been formed by an accretion of experiences, only a small number of which we can readily recall. You may remember the specifics of only a few conversations with your best friend, but you would never ask if talking to him or her was a waste of time. As for the arts, I can remember in detail only a tiny fraction of the music I have listened to, or the movies I have watched, or the paintings I have looked at, but it would be absurd to claim that experiencing those works had no influence on me. The same could be said of reading.

Still, reading is different from life, and writing is different from those other art forms. Indeed, reading’s great distinction may be that it is not an experience to be experienced only as an experience (otherwise, poets wouldn’t have to sweat so hard to make their poems a performance rather than discourse). A book, even a novel, contains information, in the strictest sense, and the most obvious purpose of reading a book is to acquire that information for oneself. And unlike a catch-and-release fisherman, when I acquire that information, I want to keep it. I enjoyed reading “Perjury” and am relieved and happy that I retain its gestalt, but I didn’t actually read it for pleasure or for its gestalt. I read it so that I would know, consciously, a lot about the Hiss case. Well, guess what? I don’t.

I suppose one solution would be to use the techniques recommended in study guides for retaining reading assignments. Do not recline! First review the table of contents and index. Read actively, underlining and making notations in the text. Review what you have read, making notes (three to five pages for every hundred pages of text).

Some good ideas, surely. But “Do not recline”? Impossible.