Nothing Loved is Lost

On Remembrance and Recovery

My father was not much involved with his children; he read books obsessively, and if I wanted time with him, I found something in his book-lined den and sat on the floor near him, soon lost in some well-worn, illustrated volume. He often invited me to accompany him to a used bookstore, and would treat me to a book or two of my own I could add to his pile. By the time I left for college, he had opened his own used bookshop. Throughout several ensuing years, I worked in the shop weekends while pursuing graduate studies. My personal collection grew substantially over the decades. Now I often retrace my life-long spiritual and mental pilgrimage as I walk along the rows of musty shelves laden with so many tangible mementos of awakenings, discoveries, epiphanies and passions. 

Often I pull a volume out and smile to remember its story (a pamphlet on treasure digging from a quaint bookshop in Puget Sound; a 17th century vellum-bound volume from 1637, gifted by my father at the end of a summer stint working with him; a paperback fished out of a BYU bookstore bargain bin that kindled but could not sustain an alternate academic path in the sciences). This morning, I pulled out a collection of essays that caught my eye—only to discover, disconcertingly, that the margins were speckled with faint annotations I had made in a book no longer familiar to me. What happened to all those startling facts and stirring insights and provocations that once registered so profoundly on my heart and mind? I pause and scan the shelves and am pierced by the sense of loss, of waste, like fruit harvested but then forgotten and spoiled on a back shelf in the cellar.

As a graduate student in North Carolina, I went to hear George Steiner, one of the twentieth century’s greatest essayists and literary critics. On this occasion he delivered a passionate apologia for a life of learning. At one point, he recounted the story of a Russian scholar, a woman of vast erudition and a polyglot professor of literature. She had been convicted as a political dissident and was imprisoned in the Soviet gulag. How did she survive those long terrible years?

This woman had a vast store of beautiful poetry in her mind. She spent her time mentally translating every poem or fragment of verse she could remember into each language in her repertoire. The exercise occupied her barren hours and maintained her sanity and spirits. At this moment in his address Professor Steiner looked out at the hundreds of students in his audience and asked, “With what kind of furniture is the temple of your mind furnished? What resources of memory could you draw upon in time of need?” 

Modern neuroscience holds out the likelihood that vastly more memories reside in our brains that we can call to mind. In one of many such experiments, a test subject, when her temporal lobe was stimulated with gentle electrical pulses, vividly relived forgotten moments of her past: “a mother calling her little boy;” “watching a travelling circus” as a child; other vivid scenes like faded photos in an album springing to life in 3-D technicolor. A rare syndrome exists in which persons with “highly superior autobiographical memory” (HSAM) actually remember every day of their lives in high-definition detail. Neuroscientists and clinicians who have studied such persons believe they do not form memories any differently than we do. Their working hypothesis is that some individuals spend more time absorbing, rethinking and rehearsing recent experiences so as to forge readier, more durable access to what Augustine called the “vast palace of memory.”  

I have a fantasy that in a life yet to unfold more fully, every beautiful word I have read, like every edifying conversation with friends I have relished, every forgotten taste of homemade bread I have savored, every kind thought I have entertained, will be mine again. Not like a 3x5 card in a file, or as data bits accessed by keyboard or cranial implant—but as part of a more fulsome present self. But I am beginning to think that such a fantasy may be to miss the point of that heroic prisoner of conscience quietly murmuring recalled poetry in a lonely cell, and the question George Steiner posed. 

The mind is always at work, assembling out of the materials we make available to it the furniture of the temple of the soul. Our memories are, in the most powerful sense, already present to us. They are always present to us. They are examples of those “things unknown” that, outside of our actual awareness, “have a secret influence on the soul.” Nothing that we love is ever truly lost. That is why we must love all and everything that we can.

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Artwork by Erik Desmazières.