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Memory
Marcel Proust - The Method of Memoryp76 ... Proust knew that every time he lost himself in a recollection he also lost track of time, the tick-tock of the clock drowned out by the echoey murmurs of his mind. It was there, in his own memory, that he would live forever. His past would become a masterpiece.
... Proust used his intuition, his slavish devotion to himself and his art, to refine his faith in memory into an entire treatise. In the stuffy silence of his Parisian studio, he listened so intently to his sentimental brain that he discovered how it operated.
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... As scientists dissect our remembrances into a list of molecules and brain regions, they fail to realize that they are channeling a reclusive French novelist. Proust may not have lived forever, but his theory of memory endures.
Intuitions
p77 ... He believed that while art and science both dealt in facts... only the artist was able to describe reality as it was actually experienced...
p78 Proust learned to believe in the strange power of art from the philosopher Henri Bergson. [Footnote: Proust... read Bergson's Matter and Memory in 1909, just as he was beginning to compose Swann's Way...] ... The laws of science were fine for inert matter, Bergson said, for discerning the relationships between atoms and cells, but us? We had a consciousness, a memory, a being. According to Bergson, this reality -- the reality of our self-consciousness -- could not be reduced or experimentally dissected. He believed that we could only understand ourselves through intuition, a process that required lots of introspection, lazy days contemplating our inner connections. Basically, it was bourgeois meditation. [Or "taking stock," regieren, from The Magic Mountain. And doesn't this recall Lin Yutang?]
...Proust's thorough absorption of Bergson's philosophy led him to conclude that the nineteenth-century novel, with its privileging of things over thoughts, had everything exactly backwards. "The kind of literature which contents itself with 'describing things,' " Proust wrote, "with giving them merely a miserable abstract of lines an surfaces, is in fact, though it calls itself realist, the furthest removed from reality." As Bergson insisted, reality is best understood subjectively, its truths accessed intuitively.
p79 [Compare this passage with Moncrieff. Dodged a bullet there, Moncrieff's translation is at least as good.]
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... He actually intuited a lot about the structure of our brain. In 1911, the year of the madeleine, physiologists had no idea how the senses connected inside the skull. One of Proust's deep insights was that our senses of smell and taste bear a unique burden of memory:
p80 When from a long distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
...smell and taste are the only senses that connect directly to the hippocampus, the center of the brain's long-term memory. Their mark is indelible. All our other senses... are first processed by the thalamus, the source of language and the front door to consciousness. As a result, these senses are much less efficient at summoning up our past. [I wonder about this in the case of music (hearing) but only a little, smell really is more profound. It is interesting that hearing, sight, and touch are mediated by language. I suppose this is why it is so hard to describe smells.] ...
p81 Of course, once Proust began to remember his past, he lost all interest in the taste of the madeleine. Instead, he became obsessed with how he felt about the cookie, with what the cookie meant to him...
In this Proustian vision, the cookie is worthy of philosophy because in the mind, everything is connected... Only by meticulously retracing the loom of our neural connections -- however nonsensical those connections may be -- can we understand ourselves, for we are the loom...
The Lie of Yesterday
..."It is a labor in vain to attempt to recapture memory: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile . . ." ...
p82 ... he believed that our recollections were phony. Although they felt real, they were actually elaborate fabrications. Take the madeleine. Proust realized that the moment we finish eating the cookie... we begin warping the memory of the cookie to fit our own personal narrative. We bend the facts to suit our story, as "our intelligence reworks the experience." Proust warns us to treat the reality of our memories carefully, and with a degree of skepticism...
The strange twist in the story is that science is discovering the molecular truth behind these Proustian theories. Memory is fallible. Our remembrance of things past is imperfect.
...Our recollections are cynical things, designed by the brain to always feel true, regardless of whether or not they actually occurred.
[Santiago Ramon y Cajal determines that neurons are islands separated from each other by synaptic clefs. Making memories requires new proteins. "The moment in time is incorporated into the architecture of the brain." Other scientists show that memories can be altered, "...we like to think of our memories as being immutable impressions, somehow separate from the act of remembering them. But they aren't. A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes." "...every time we remember anything, the neuronal structure of the memory is delicately transformed, a process called reconsolidation... The memory is altered in the absence of the original stimulus, becoming less about what you remember and more about you... The moment you remember the cookie's taste is the same moment you forget what it really tasted like."]
p85 Proust presciently anticipated the discovery of memory reconsolidation. For him, memories were like sentences: they were things you never stopped changing. As a result, Proust was not only an avid sentimentalist, he was also an insufferable rewriter... [Not unlike Walt Whitman.] Nothing he wrote was ever permanent...
p87 Clearly, Proust believed in the writing process. He never outlined his stories first. He thought that the novel, like the memories it unfaithfully described, must unfurl naturally... [The first draft may "unfurl naturally" but if you are constantly rewriting and editing aren't you imposing an order after that first draft? The musical structure of the work isn't really consistent with an automatic writing model. Now Martha Grimes novels do unfurl naturally, which I enjoy, but that's probably not the best way to create a symphonic epic like In Search of Lost Time.]
p87 For a novel about memory, the plasticity of the novel's narrative was one of its most realistic elements. Proust was always refining his fictional sentences in light of new knowledge, altering his past words to reflect his present circumstances. On the last night of his life, as he lay prostrate in bed, weakened by his diet of ice cream, beer, and barbituates, he summoned Celeste, his beloved maid, to take a little dictation. He wanted to change a section... that described the slow death of a character, since he now knew a little bit more about what dying was like.
...As long as we have memories to recall, the margins of those memories are being modified to fit what we know now. Synapses are crossed out, dendrites are tweaked, and the memorized moment that feels so honest is thoroughly revised...
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p88 One of the morals of the Search is that every memory is inseparable from the moment of its recollection. This is why Proust devoted fifty-eight tedious pages to the mental state of the narrator before he ate a single madeleine. He wanted to show how his current condition distorted his sense of the past... Proustian nostalgia... remembers things as being far better than they actually were. But Proust... knew that the Combray he yearned for was not the Combray that was. (As Proust put it,"The only paradise is paradise lost.") ... there is no way to describe the past without lying. Our memories are not like fiction. They are fiction...
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p89 ... memories do not directly represent reality. Instead, they are imperfect copies of what actually happened, a Xerox of a Xerox of a mimeograph of the original photograph. Proust intuitively knew that our memories required this transformative process. If you prevent the memory from changing, it ceases to exist. Combray is lost. This is Proust's guilty secret: we have to misremember something in order to remember it.
A thought here about the author's comment above that when we remember we lose track of time. I read something recently that claimed humans can't actually multitask. We can really only to one thing at a time, and if we try to do several things at once we are just switching back and forth and each switch requires a degree of re-orientation. The same is true of experiencing time. We can experience our present time or recall our past, but if we recall the past it is overlapping with the present. All your current sensory inputs (including some you may not be consciously aware of) are getting blended in with your memory. You can think of it like a multi-track recording where there's always an open mike in the studio. Playing something back also means recording the ambient sounds of the studio as a new track on the recording. And the memory of the time you were remembering is now a part of that previous memory.
I also need to add a few Wiki quotes about Bergson:
Bergson was born in the Rue Lamartine in Paris, not far from the Palais Garnier (the old Paris opera house) in 1859. His father, the pianist Michał Bergson, was of a Polish Jewish background (originally bearing the name Berekson). His great-grandmother, Temerl Bergson, was a well-known patroness and benefactor of Polish Jewry, especially those associated with the Hasidic movement.[8][9] His mother, Katherine Levison, daughter of a Yorkshire doctor, was from an English and Irish Jewish background. The Bereksohns were a famous Jewish entrepreneurial family[10] of Polish descent. Henri Bergson's great-great-grandfather, Szmul Jakubowicz Sonnenberg, called Zbytkower, was a prominent banker and a protégé of Stanisław August Poniatowski,[11][12] King of Poland from 1764 to 1795.
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Bergson attended the Lycée Fontanes (known as the Lycée Condorcet 1870–1874 and 1883–present) in Paris from 1868 to 1878. He had previously received a Jewish religious education.[14] Between 14 and 16, however, he lost his faith. According to Hude (1990), this moral crisis is tied to his discovery of the theory of evolution, according to which humanity shares common ancestry with modern primates, a process sometimes construed as not needing a creative deity.[15]
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Bergson traveled to London in 1908 and met there with William James, the Harvard philosopher who was Bergson's senior by seventeen years, and who was instrumental in calling the attention of the Anglo-American public to the work of the French professor. The two became great friends. James's impression of Bergson is given in his Letters under date of 4 October 1908:
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The Roman Catholic Church however took the step of banning Bergson's three books, accused of pantheism (that is, of conceiving of God as immanent to his Creation and of being himself created in the process of the Creation)[16] by placing them upon the Index of prohibited books (Decree of 1 June 1914).
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The Creative Evolution in particular attempted to think through the continuous creation of life, and explicitly pitted itself against Herbert Spencer's evolutionary philosophy. Spencer had attempted to transpose Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in philosophy and to construct a cosmology based on this theory (Spencer also coined the expression "survival of the fittest"). Bergson disputed what he saw as Spencer's mechanistic philosophy.[35]
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The foundation of Henri Bergson’s philosophy, his theory of Duration, he discovered when trying to improve the inadequacies of Herbert Spencer’s philosophy.[36] Bergson introduced Duration as a theory of time and consciousness in his doctoral thesis Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness as a response to another of his influences: Immanuel Kant.[37]
Kant believed that free will (better perceived as The Will) could only exist outside of time and space, indeed the only non-determined aspect of our private existence in the universe, separate to water cycles, mathematics and mortality. However, we could therefore not know whether or not it exists, and that it is nothing but a pragmatic faith.[37] Bergson responded that Kant, along with many other philosophers, had confused time with its spatial representation.[38] In reality, Bergson argued, Duration is unextended yet heterogeneous, and so its parts cannot be juxtaposed as a succession of distinct parts, with one causing the other. Based on this he concluded that determinism is an impossibility and free will pure mobility, which is what Bergson identified as being the Duration.[39]
Random much?
Was in the middle of my gym routine when it occurred to me that I wasn't sure if I had left the lock securing the painter's stuff in our new little "room" locked or unlocked. I intended to leave it unlocked but in place, but had I? After going back and forth a few times and thinking what a disaster it would be if the painter couldn't get to work on what is supposed to be his last day on site, I decided to go check. This involves walking a total of 12 blocks and climbing the equivalent of a 15 story building... so not a trivial decision.When I arrived in the laundry room I found the painter stumped by the unlocked lock. I removed it. We talked a little about what was left to do. And I returned to the gym. If I had been sure the lock was unlocked, I wouldn't have returned. Would he have eventually realized he could just turn the lock and remove it, or did I really need to be there? Who knows.
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