Posted Sunday morning, July 26, 2020.
The late mathematician, physicist, public intellectual, and writer Freeman Dyson in 2015. Quanta Magazine, screen capture from "Freeman Dyson: A 'Rebel' Without a Ph.D." on YouTube.
What I wrote in my post last Sunday, “Six Degrees of Separation from Albert Einstein", where I claimed to have an exceptional memory---that wasn’t a boast. Ask anyone who knows me. Names and faces, books I’ve read, movies I’ve seen---and when and where---places I’ve gone, things I did there, who was with me, what we talked about, what they did and said, what I felt, what they felt---and by the way I’m good at reading minds and intuiting moods, too, which I think is due to my good memory. When you ask me if I’ve heard your favorite joke or anecdote before, it’s likely that not only that I have, but I remember every time you told it and remember it better. I’m just usually too polite to say so. It’s not photographic. It doesn’t take dictation. But it remembers the gist. It recalls in extended illustrated summaries with clips and detailed images. If it doesn’t record whole conversations, it keeps detailed notes. It keeps events in order chronologically. I think it works the way most people’s memories work, it simply remembers more and with more clarity. Except when it doesn’t.
The trouble with even the best memories is that memory is unreliable. It plays tricks. It self-edits. It’s suggestible. Memory is a function of mind and mind is a function of the brain and the brain is like every other part of your body, physically vulnerable, subject to all the shocks that flesh is heir to. A tired or injured brain can struggle to recall its owner’s name. An overstimulated brain can remember too much all at once and jumble things up. A healthy brain at its best can still misfire and remember things out of order or out of place and time. It can forget facts and just plain make things up. I believe my own memory most of the time. But I know there are things it forgets to tell me and things it can’t.
Since we’ve been up here at the Old Mannion Homestead, I’ve been spot-reading the late physicist and Nobel Laureate Freeman Dyson’s “Maker of Patterns”, which Dyson called an “Autobiography Through Letters.” I’ve been doing it in, um, memory of Pop Mannion. Dyson was one of Pop’s intellectual heroes and “Maker of Patterns” is a book he’d have liked to have owned. There was one degree of separation between Pop and Dyson, through Hans Bethe, who was one of Dyson’s teachers at Cornell and a lifelong friend, but I don’t think Pop ever met Dyson. In fact, I’m pretty sure he didn’t. If he had he’d have told me when he loaned me his copy of “The Starship and the Canoe”, and I’d have remembered that. But he liked what he knew of him as a person and a thinker through his writing and he would have been sad to hear of his death this past February at the too young age of ninety-six. “Maker of Patterns” would have confirmed Pop’s good opinion of the man and the scientist. But he would have observed ironically that the book went on one letter too long. The letters that make up the book were written between 1941 and 1978: “the first half of my adult life”. Dyson says he stopped there to keep the book “short and readable”---it’s still 383 pages---and because that’s about when the scientifically productive and politically active part of his life had wound down. “The letters continued for thirty more years, but the second half of a life is usually more interesting than the first. I believe it was Rudyard Kipling who said a man should get half his dying in before forty.” The last letter in “Maker of Patterns” is dated June 15, 1978. The second to last is dated April 27---Pop’s birthday.
“Letters,” Dyson says in his introduction, “are valuable witnesses to history because they are written without hindsight.” The letters that compose the book were all written close in time to the events they relate, usually within a few days afterward, some of them during those events when Dyson would take advantage of a break in the action to dash off a letter or continue one he had started already.
That makes “Maker of Patterns” a fairly reliable record, but still more a record of Dyson’s impressions at the time. Then to tie the letters together into a cohesive narrative Dyson had to write passages between the letters (short, in some cases just a couple of sentences), which not only complicated the writing, it meant leaving out salient facts. Those transitional passages have the job of putting the letters in context, filling in details, giving background, introducing characters, recapping events, and summarizing debates and the issues---intellectual, scientific, philosophic, political, literary, aesthetic, and moral---that stirred those debates, and where he couldn’t find outside sources to help with that, Dyson had to rely on his memory---the memory of a still very sharp but still very old nonageneration looking back over the expanse of time and trying to recall what was happening as far back as forty, fifty, sixty, and seventy odd years ago.
He gets many things wrong. He knows that, and admits it straight away in the introduction: “When I compare my memories to the letters, I see that I not only forget things , I also remember things that never happened.” And he tells this anecdote by way of an apology and a warning to paying customers expecting a traditionally self-assured memoir and, I suspect with chagrin, readers inordinately proud of their own prodigious memories. Don’t @ me.
Dyson:
A striking example of a false memory was a lunch party in 1958 at the home of Robert Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty. Two other couples were there, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and his wife Ursula...and the retired diplomat George Kennan and his wife Annelise...After lunch we sat around a glowing wood fire in the living room. Oppenheimer pulled a beautiful leather-bound volume from his bookcase and read a poem, “The Pulley” by George Herbert (1633), in a beautifully cadenced voice. George Kennan had not known Herbert’s poetry before. Oppenheimer said it was high time for the two Georges to get to know each other. Then he turned to Ursula Niehbur and said, “But you of course know him well.” It turned out that George Herbert was a distant ancestor of Ursula. Oppenheimer then continued to read other poems of Herbert, and so the afternoon continued with personal warmth and poetry around the fireside. I have a vivid memory of sitting with that group around the fireside. Recently I was reading some old letters and found one written long ago by Ursula Niebuhr, describing that lunch party and confirming my memory. Every detail of my memory is correct except for one. I was not there. My memory has somehow stolen that scene from Ursula and put me into it. (Dyson xiv)
Here’s a secret of my own prodigious memory: I look stuff up on the sly. Out of curiosity, I looked up the scene Dyson falsey remembered in Ray Monk’s biography of Oppenheimer and George Kennan’s own idiosyncratic exercise in memoir, “Sketches From a Life”. At any rate, I tried to look them up. Kennan makes several cameo appearances in Monk’s book but there’s no sign of Annalise Kennan or the Niebuhrs in the index, or of George Herbert either. And Kennan’s book doesn’t have an index. Just flipping through, I didn’t see any entries from the relevant time period, the late 1940s when Kennan and Oppenheimer met and became friends. But! I did look up the poem Dyson “remembered” Oppenheimer reading to the friends gathered around that fireside, and here it is...
When God at first made man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by,
“Let us,” said he, “pour on him all we can.
Let the world’s riches, which dispersèd lie,
Contract into a span.”So strength first made a way;
Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honour, pleasure.
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that, alone of all his treasure,
Rest in the bottom lay.“For if I should,” said he,
“Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts instead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature;
So both should losers be.“Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness;
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast.”--- “The Pulley” by George Herbert.
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