When a child loves something, they memorize it. They learn it, as we sometimes say, by heart. My nephew memorized hundreds of species of dinosaurs: long Latin names, and whether they were herbivores or carnivores, and what sorts of climates they lived in. His little brother, long before he could form full sentences, could identify every category of truck by sight, distinguishing between a dump truck and a concrete truck. Children memorize song lyrics they don’t understand and the music-video choreography to go with them. They memorize their favorite books, so that sometimes, adorably, they will “read” out loud long before they are literate. They don’t know that the book in their hands is upside-down. Nobody tells them to do this.
Children’s fantasy worlds also often feature scenes of memorization, or, more broadly, of what we might call reproductive learning—that is, learning that seeks to absorb, transmit, and protect existing knowledge rather than forge new knowledge. I read a lot of Victorian literature as a kid (stuff like A Little Princess), and also books like Harry Potter, which partakes of a certain Victorian school-novel tradition. In these books, children are forever having to memorize dates or names, or to recite lines of poetry, or to copy out texts, sometimes for pedagogy and sometimes for punishment. This reproductive learning mode is usually cast as a minor annoyance or humiliation. And yet, all the same, there is clearly something seductive to child audiences about these depictions of repetition and memorization: otherwise, they wouldn’t figure so strongly in beloved works of escapist literature. I remember feeling a guilty ambivalence while reading these schoolroom scenes. I wanted to memorize, copy, and internalize: to learn by heart. All children do.
But reproductive learning was suffering from immense reputational damage during my childhood, like Lindsay Lohan or FEMA or full-fat cheese. “Rote memorization” was a punching bag. In our enlightened age children were supposed to be critical thinkers, to participate in the formation of knowledge. We were supposed to learn productively, not reproductively. At times teachers would announce that we were going to have to do a little “rote memorization,” but this was usually accompanied by an apology, and a promise that it would be kept to the barest minimum. It was much better, everybody was assured, to do creative multimedia assignments, or to break into small groups where we would voice our own opinions on a given piece of evidence. In this way, our learning would mean more to us: we would not be separate from it as passive observers, but rather active, involved, inextricable.
This carried forth into college, where seminar-style classes prioritizing participation and the creation of new ideas were broadly considered both more rigorous and more interesting than lecture-style classes prioritizing recitation. I did have some professors who were gifted at leading seminar discussions, but I had just as many who could deliver a riveting lecture. I was often bewildered by the assumption that participatory learning was superior, and that the passivity of the lecture hall was both boring and in some vague way cowardly. Why shouldn’t the professor, who had dedicated their life to a specific area of study, transmit to me what they knew? Even if, optimistically, every single seminar participant had done the reading attentively (and let’s not kid ourselves!), why would they want to listen to me, or I to them?
I’m being only a little bit hyperbolic and deliberately obnoxious here. Of course there is value in discussion. Unfortunately, I even believe that discussing literary text is among the most fun things a person can do. But it is not obviously or intrinsically superior to repetition and listening, either for education or for entertainment. There is a lot of virtue in the reproductive mode. Young children know this, when they treat copying and memorization as acts of devotion. Sports fans know this when they memorize the name and stats of the whole roster from the year their team won the Super Bowl or the World Series. Religious people know this when they memorize and recite scripture or liturgy.
The exaltation of new knowledge production over existing knowledge reproduction extends into academia, where one must “fill a gap in the literature,” by creating a new piece of knowledge or at least a new approach to the knowledge that already exists. I am not an academic, though my understanding is that this imperative to produce can be both inspiring and frustrating, and that it drives the self-accelerating trend toward hyperspecialization. There are individuals, and moments in an individual’s intellectual life, that are more amenable to producing new knowledge. There are other individuals or moments better-suited to deep reading, to memorization, to a studious absorption of information. Sometimes children want to draw a new dinosaur, sometimes they want to memorize the Latin names of 600 dinosaur species.
In a sense academics are inheritors of the monastic tradition, and the university is one of the last Medieval institutions, now probably circling the drain itself. But, while these Medieval ancestors had a primarily reproductive orientation to knowledge (copying books, memorizing texts, reciting liturgy), the modern descendant has a productive relation to it (publishing and/or perishing). Forgive me now, because I am going to quote, not a real Medieval text, but a popular fictional one: Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which is a fake translation of a nonexistent Latin text written by a 14th-century monk about a series of murders in an Italian monastery. It is a book that is deeply interested in the question of what knowledge is worth, and of what people will do for knowledge in a world where it is very costly: perform sexual favors, commit to a life of poverty and celibacy, be burned at the stake, kill. The narrator muses:
“The abbey where I was staying was probably the last to boast of excellence in the production and reproduction of learning. But perhaps for this very reason, the monks were no longer content with the holy work of copying; they wanted also to produce new complements of nature, impelled by the lust for novelty. And they did not realize…that in doing so they sanctioned the destruction of their excellence…learning is not like a coin, which remains physically whole, even through the most infamous transactions; it is, rather, like a very handsome dress, which is worn out through use and ostentation. Is not a book like that, in fact? Its pages crumble, its ink and gold turn dull, if too many hands touch it.”
This is a world where knowledge must be scratched out painfully by hand in dim winter light, or transmitted from mouth to ear. The narrator of The Name of the Rose fears there may be only one viable option for those who do not wish to devalue and destroy knowledge: “Stop reading, and only preserve?”
In our world, by contrast, existing knowledge feels cheap. One can take for granted its continuing existence and its accessibility. Unlike the narrator of The Name of the Rose, I am a child of modernity, and moreover an American.1 I believe, genuinely, that knowledge should be available to those who seek it, and that more speech is better than less speech, and that people should come up with any stupid ideas they want and talk about them. At the same time, I am a little wistful for this sense of information as a precious thing to be guarded. After all, the cheapness of knowledge may be an illusion, like all those cheap VC-subsidized Ubers and Airbnbs of the early 2010s. We are forewarned by archivists and historians of an oncoming digital dark age. Lulled into belief that knowledge has transcended its earthly limitations, and that we can ditch endless reams of it on the cloud forever and ever, we have turned a blind eye to the websites and databases blinking daily out of existence, the films no longer watchable because the technology to play them doesn’t exist anymore. I know that I’m not supposed to keep all my writing on Google Drive, but I do. Universities and archives have invested enormous amounts of money in digitizing information, which is great, but the underlying assumption—that digitized information will last forever, because the digital realm is eternal, endless, and cheap—is false. Knowledge has to live somewhere. And we might, in fact, have to let the knowledge nest inside ourselves, not only in some external tool or technology.
Today is the twentieth anniversary of hurricane Katrina. In the run-up to this inauspicious date, while everyone was either revisiting the storm or deliberately avoiding revisiting the storm, somebody showed me a water-stained, mottled Torah cover. The embroidered velvet cover had been damaged in the aftermath of the levee breach when the synagogue that owned it flooded. Despite the fact that this was one of only many losses from Katrina and a relatively minor one at that (not a life, not a house or school or neighborhood), despite the fact that I’m not really a religious Jew, I was surprisingly moved by what I saw. Or maybe I was moved by what I didn’t see: the Torah scroll itself. A Torah scroll is an artifact from an earlier period of media history. Its methods of production were frozen in place well before the invention of the printing press. It is written on parchment, and it is written without punctuation, because punctuation had not been invented when these methods of production were consecrated. Most importantly for purposes of this essay, it is written out by hand, with a quill and with specially prepared ink. It takes many months for a scribe to complete a Torah scroll. Every letter matters. There can be no blemishes or mistakes. In other words, this is one of the last remnants of that scribal tradition that once played an essential role in the dissemination of knowledge. It is an approach to the transmission of information that would be familiar to the monks in The Name of the Rose.
The Katrina-damaged Torah cover was empty because the scroll inside it had been buried. In Judaism, objects with the name of God written on them cannot be disposed of normally. They must be ceremonially buried, like people. In this worldview, words and names have a tangible, embodied value (in the beginning was the word, etc). More broadly, though, these costly, handwritten words have something of the human body in them, name-of-god or not. They make the hands throb and the back ache: hence all those amazing marginalia left by Medieval scribes, bitching about how terribly their bodies hurt, how the coming darkness will soon set them free from the hard labor of writing. The preference for productive over reproductive knowledge assumes that only in the process of production do we internalize knowledge, making it part of ourselves. But when knowledge is reproduced lovingly, it becomes inextricable from the embodied processes of its reproduction. It becomes, in other words, kind of human, or at least kind of alive, partaking of the aliveness of those who reproduce it. Children memorize dinosaurs and trucks by heart, we write out scripture by hand, everything inscribed on the body itself.
Lately, I’ve been listening to works of literature read out loud, just in the background, the way I’d listen to music. I had to put my Spotify on private mode, because I was worried my top track on Wrapped would be TS Eliot reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I heard this recording on a podcast a few weeks ago and it’s been knocking around in my brain ever since, so that, right now, it feels like part of my body: my mind is sore with it the way my legs are sore from the barre class I did the other day2. Every day I’ve got different lines stuck in my head, all in Eliot’s weird, half-American half-English voice.3 Today it’s the surprisingly sly, even smug way he says the word “me” in the line “I do not think that they will sing to me.” Yesterday morning at work it was “Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,/Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?” And then, when I was trying to fall asleep last night, it was “For I have known them all already, known them all:/Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,/I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” and in particular the repetitions of the M’s and the L’s in “them all already, known them all.”
The bits that get stuck in my head are determined by their sonic qualities. The single line “I do not think that they will sing to me” has no rhymes and therefore is kicking about in there on its own. But the rhyme of “afternoons” and “spoons” keeps that last stanza together. Ditto for “ices” and “crisis.” What I mean is that the physicality of the words feels inextricable from my own physicality as I move around the world. Listening leads to memorization and memorization leads to the opening up of your mind and body, the welcoming of something external into yourself. My relationship to Prufrock is entirely reproductive, but no less participatory for that. Instead there is a delicious detachment from my own mind. The voice in my head has gone dormant so that the voice of a dead man can live there instead. Like a person who speaks in tongues, I get to be a physical vessel for a voice from outside myself. By hand, by heart, by the voice in your head.
Plus, Eco's gift, and the thing that makes people love this book so much, is how incredibly foreign the characters feel, their beliefs so sincere and so high-stakes and yet so utterly alien.
Humblebrag alert!!!
I am not going to talk about this concept in relation to Eliot's high modernism, and I am not going to quote “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” because I don’t feel like it. Sound off in the comments tho
Possession, romanticized lol.
One of the many things I resoluted (?) to do this year was to learn 25 things by heart, and I’ve not thought about my resolutions much because I never keep up with them. But I often find myself writing in my note on my notes app things I could memorize and finally a couple of days ago I dedicated a notebook to writing them down (as the first step to memorization and learning to me is always to write things down because I haven’t given up taking notes by hand and I don’t think I ever will because I’m certain it’s more conducive to learning); so this post couldn’t come at a better time for me!
The first few items are poems I remember from my childhood: even as a late 90s baby I had two primary school teachers who had me memorize poems (I think them being baby boomer Spaniards who had to memorize The List of Goth Kings, a touchstone of Francoist education, had something to do with it but who knows). And it’s unbelievable to me how those poems have stuck in my mind, how I still remember the cadence in which I learnt them or in which they were read to me, even the ones we read but we didn’t have to memorize; and also how I know that it was through reading those poems that I learnt words and facts I still know to this day, and know better than things I tried really hard to commit to memory for my degree.
Buy maybe it’s just me because I’ve always thought that being a scribe would have been an awesome job.