Michael Nielsen has an incredible blog post entitled Augmenting Long Term Memory, in which he discusses how he uses spaced repetition learning software (specifically Anki) to learn facts, read and internalize papers, and understand complex topics. The general disparaging of raw memory as an integral component of understanding deserves its own book, but I am interested here in a particular throwaway footnote. Michael mentions an experiment whereby he attempted to learn an entire book, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, to learn for himself whether such a feat was possible. He gave up after a few week having determined that it would be possible but prohibitively time consuming. He suggests that memorizing an entire book may have a strong impact on a person, influencing their language and writing, and by implication also influencing their thinking, and therefore themselves quite deeply.

This idea has stuck with me. I know from the small amount of poetry I have memorized that it has had an outsized impact on my mental world. Almost ever week I remember E. A. Houseman’s lines “Into my heart an air that kills, From yon far country blows; What are those blue remembered hills, What Spires, what farms are those?…”, and this effects me. I remember a mood, a feeling, an idea, and that makes up a small part of who I am. We are what we repeatedly think and do, so if your head is filled with poetry or prose or technical facts, you start to embody those ideas and become those things in a way.

Andy Matuschak mentions somewhere the idea that if you casually learn about something you generally wont identify as a student of of that thing, but if you continuously re-engage with the content of that study, through spaced repetition learning or by continuously bringing those ideas to mind, you start to identify as a student of that thing. If you read a bit of Plato here, Nietzsche there, you am not a philosophy, but if you think about it regularly, committing things to memory and having them to hand, start making my own connections, then maybe you are a philosopher, or you will start feeling like one at least.

Every time you commit a little poem to memory, or even a single, atomic Anki fact, you are participating in a memory experiment, seeing who you will become if the geography of your mental landscape is molded in this way. One or two facts or poems don’t make much of a dent, maybe you’ve planted a small shrub in a vast, sprawling forest, but if you learn an entire book, there you have built a mountain where previously the landscape was flat (or rolling hills, or brackish wetland, or scorching desert, depending on how you like your analogy). Anki is about making memory a choice. More than that, memory is about making your mental landscape a choice.

I like the idea of an extreme experiment to see what would happen if I just built a mountain, instead of the slow (and much more sensible) experiment of accumulating Anki cards and gradually changing your mental landscape. I doubt I could do A Tale of Two Cities as it’s over 130,000 words long and I’m not particularly fond of Dickens. I don’t want to build a Dickens sized mountain in my brain. I do like Shakespeare though, and all of his plays except Hamlet are under 30,000 words. My favourite play (so far) is Henry V, and clocking in at 26,119 words, I reckon that’s memorizable. Actors memorize lines all the time (admittedly only a subset of an entire play) so there’s an existence proof.

There is the question of is it worth it? There are plenty of other things to spend your time on, why do this ridiculous, obscure thing that almost everyone else wont understand? To the second I could answer that doing ridiculous, obscure things is fun and exciting, and takes you far away from ordinary human experience, but until I have an answer to the first question I don’t think I can throw myself into the experiment fully. A man only has so many hours in a day. But maybe a small experiment. Systematically committing more poems to memory, more quotes and more speeches. This is like taking a few light walks in the countryside before committing to the pilgrimage to Rome (or Istanbul, or India… all places I would like to walk to).

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash’d in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, and gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide on man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth;
For ‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o’er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.