For years, William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience has sat on my bookshelf reproaching me for my laziness and ignorance. It was one of a handful of “great books” in my modest library that I hadn’t yet got around to reading. Few people dispute the notion that Varieties is a hugely significant book, by one of America’s greatest thinkers, on a vitally important subject. No more excuses, then. The time had come to enlighten myself. So, a few weeks ago, I pulled out my copy, blew off the dust, opened it, and was met with the horrifying sight of my own handwriting. At the end of each chapter, I had scribbled detailed, hideously pedantic notes summarizing James’s arguments. In fact, I had read The Varieties of Religious Experience. And hadn’t remembered a word of it.
Judging by the solemnity of my notes, I’d like to think my reading of Varieties dates from my earnest twenties, when my intellectual insecurity compelled me to disfigure many of my books with superfluous annotations. But no, I’m even more horrified to see that the 2004 publication date of my Barnes & Noble Classics edition confirms that my lifelong habit of useless pedantry continued at least into my late forties. And probably to this day. A sampling of my notes will give the flavor of my autodidactic aspirations at their least ingratiating:
W.J.’s interest in religion is entirely on the personal & inward, not on the institutional or theological. This inward experience of religion is extremely broad & does not necessarily require belief in a specific God—Emersonian mysticism, for example, or Buddhism. Furthermore…
My only excuse is that in inscribing these tedious and probably not even accurate summaries, I was attempting to engage seriously with James’s thought and lodge its insights in my memory. And how did that go?
Well, at least I can look forward to reading The Varieties of Religious Experience again. Here’s the thing: I believe my second reading will profit from the failure of my first reading. Subliminally, more of James’s thought might have penetrated my consciousness than my faulty memory is willing to reveal. How do I know this? I don’t. Nevertheless, a lifetime of reading and forgetting has established certain patterns that I’ve learned to take on trust. One of those patterns is that in rereading a complex and multilayered book, I almost always derive more from the second reading than I did from the first. Partly, that’s a matter of life experience, continuing education, and so on; in my sixties, I am a more informed reader than I was in my scattershot twenties. But it’s also a matter of memory. Why did Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, to take the example of a book I recently revisited after many years, seem so much more affecting the second time around? If you had asked me beforehand, all I could have told you by way of plot summary was that it was about a guy named Julien Sorel with a bad Napoleon complex. In fact, many details buried in my memory rose to the surface in my rereading: the ecclesiastical Latin that is Julien’s ticket out of the provinces; the comic opera of his last tryst with Madame de Rênal; the flightiness of his aristocratic lover Mathilde de la Mole. How many of these details I truly remembered and how many I imagined remembering, I can’t say, but there was a flow to my reading that I wouldn’t have experienced the first time around. It was as if the first reading had been a rehearsal for the second; a substratum of familiarity remained. Reading a book is in some ways rather like writing one. The initial effort is often preliminary. It’s the subsequent rereading—or revision—that carries the load.
Although I wouldn’t want to extrapolate too much on the basis of my peculiarities, I am surely not alone in forgetting key components of important books. In fact, I have an august model in the figure of Michel de Montaigne, a world-class forgetter whose frank treatment of his own forgetfulness is a recurring sub-theme in his Essays. Naturally, I had forgotten the prevalence or even presence of this theme until I stumbled on a reference that sent me back to my own dusty copy of the Essays. There I found, in the chapter “Of Books,” one of Montaigne’s characteristic confessions of fallibility:
To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before and scribbled over with my notes, I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book…the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it.
Admittedly, Montaigne was forgetting books he had read in Latin; I was merely forgetting books written in or translated into my native English. Furthermore, Montaigne’s appended notes must have served their purpose, since he testified to their efficacy, whereas my annotations—well, they didn’t help me much with William James, did they? Blessedly, I never annotated my copy of Montaigne, which clears me of the embarrassment of writing about forgetting and then forgetting it.
For all the laments about his treacherous memory, Montaigne was a voracious and passionate reader. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to call him a voracious and passionate re-reader. His personal library, of about a thousand volumes, was vast by the standards of his time (1533–1592), but he returned again and again to Terence, Tacitus, Plutarch, Virgil, and other favored authors. While some scholars think he was exaggerating for effect, I have no trouble believing his claims:
I leaf through books, I do not study them. What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else’s. It is only the material from which my judgment has profited, and the thoughts and ideas with which it has become imbued; the author, the place, the words, and other circumstances I immediately forget.
The question is, did Montaigne’s spotty memory aid or hinder him in becoming the creative, engaged reader that he was? Yes. By which I mean to say, I think it aided him. I have no evidence for this assertion, of course, except to cite my own case, which parallels Montaigne’s in temperament, if nothing else. In spite of my lingering pedantry, I am very much the sort of unsystematic, pleasure-seeking reader that Montaigne described himself as being:
I seek in books only to give myself pleasure by honest amusement; or if I study, I seek only the learning that treats of the knowledge of myself and instructs me in how to die well and live well.
What Montaigne acquired from his reading was “something I no longer recognize as anyone else’s”—that is, he possessed, in the deepest sense, the books he read. He made them his own, never mind the weight of authority or tradition. I can’t think of a better formulation for a meaningful and personalized manner of reading. Would a less defective memory have heightened the sense of surprise and delight that Montaigne derived from his favorite books? Unlikely. I myself read the Essays—when I do—with a sense of surprise and delight (mixed, at times, with frustration and impatience). That’s because I’ve forgotten them.
A somewhat less majestic forgetter is the French literature scholar and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard, whose How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read makes much of Montaigne’s avowed forgetfulness. From its outrageous title to its many delicious Gallicisms (“talking about books you haven’t read is an authentically creative activity”; “What I have attempted to call into question in this book is this word about”; “the only true object of criticism is not the work it discusses, but itself”), Bayard’s book playfully subverts itself while posing serious questions about reading. His principal ideas depend less on their claims to truth than on their delight in provocation, and they are, in any case, unverifiable. Nevertheless, Bayard, who consigns his own Enquête sur Hamlet: Le dialogue de sourds to the category of “FB” (“books I have forgotten,” as opposed to “SB,” “books I have skimmed,” and “HB,” “books I have heard about”), argues commonsensically that “we do not retain in memory complete books identical to the books remembered by everyone else, but rather fragments surviving from partial readings, frequently fused together and further recast by our private fantasies.” We need not be deconstructionists, whose methods Bayard cleverly parodies, to believe that the books in our heads and the books themselves do not align in anything like perfect or even near agreement.
I can confirm this last statement not only as a reader but also as a writer. Those friends and acquaintances who have read my few and unremunerative books retain precious little memory of their contents. Recounting to these friends the same ideas and stories I first used in my books, I’ve yet to discover a glimmer of recognition or even a glazed look implying, “Yes, Stephen, we’ve heard this one before.” Perversely, I’ve tested, with leading questions, friends who have recently read and claimed to like one of my books, and no one ever catches the inference or picks up the thread I’ve left so conspicuously dangling. Several explanations for this lack of recognition present themselves: 1) If I were a better writer, people would better remember my writing; 2) my friends have read neither my books nor the treatise by Pierre Bayard that would enable them to lie with proficiency; or 3) people simply don’t remember most of what they’ve read. I prefer the third explanation, as it mitigates the wounding of my vanity and also corresponds closely to my own experience. I don’t remember most of what I’ve read, either. Why should people remember most of what they’ve read of my writing?
To return to Montaigne, the patron saint of forgetting, what he sanctions is deep reading independent of memorization. We don’t have to remember whether it was Cicero or Tacitus or Toni Morrison or Taylor Swift who said this or that. All that writing is, or should be, “the material from which [our] judgment has profited, and the thoughts and ideas with which it has become imbued.” Reading is a sort of osmosis; our consciousness assimilates the meaningful bits and deepens the pool of thought and feeling that constitutes a sensibility. Hence that sensation of ease and anticipation that I, in my better moments, experience when I reread a significant book. I rarely remember what’s going to happen next, or what evidence follows upon which arguments, but I am more than ever receptive to whatever surprises and astonishments I only partly grasped on my initial reading.
As with books, so with movies, paintings, plays, sculptures, musical compositions, and other works of art: We misremember them profitably if our reacquaintance with them stirs something latent within us. The novelist Julian Barnes has written about revisiting much-loved paintings and sculptures and finding, to his surprise, just how wrong he had been about their size and shape and color and form. Surprised but not disappointed. As he wrote in the London Review of Books:
Is it the case that the greater the work of art the better you remember it? Clearly not…. Perhaps the prospect of revisiting a great work of art makes the memory tremble, as if you are going to have to sit an examination paper. And is it, finally, a bad thing if memory lets us down? Not necessarily. It might confirm some ongoing, organic relationship between ourselves and the work in question.
Doesn’t the very act of reading (or rereading) constitute an “ongoing, organic relationship” with the book in hand? And if we can’t have that, why read at all? What would reading be but mechanics? Selective or even wholesale forgetting plays no small part in the establishment of that organic relationship. Rereading a book we’ve largely forgotten is like stepping into the same river twice: We are not quite the same person, and it is not quite the same book. Didn’t some old Greek say that? I forget.