In my last two posts I addressed C.S. Lewis’ powers of retention. The first post presented anecdotal evidence for his prodigious ability to retain the text that he read. I concede there are no scientific tests, only anecdotes. But the anecdotes in Oxford lore are numerous, and the gist of the remembrances is much the same.
My purpose in the second post was to explain the source and the nature of Lewis memory. By “nature” I mean how his memory worked. Was it “rote” memory? No. His skill set certainly included “rote” memory, but “rote” implies the ability to retain information without understanding it. Cramming for an exam in college is “rote” memory, but that information has a half-life just long enough to pass the exam. I do not believe “rote” memory explains Lewis’ powers of retention in any meaningful way.
Was it “photographic memory”? No. I sought to debunk the notion that Lewis had “photographic memory” not because he did not have it, but because nobody has ever had it. My position on “audiographic memory” is no different.
To be sure, Lewis’ memory was highly visual and, at the same time, highly aural. How either of those “natures” works is a mystery. I am disinclined to believe anyone—academics and research scientists alike– understands how the memory really works.
What is undeniable is that some people have powers of retention vastly superior to other people. For these fortunate people, perhaps all I can say it that they are “blessed by God.” So, too, I say about C.S. Lewis.
Still, some of my readers want to know what techniques or practices Lewis used to enhance his God-kindled talent for memorizing text. In other words, is there anything we can learn from Lewis’ amazing memory skills that we can employ? That is the purpose of this post.
The answer is YES. As I see it, there are five techniques and practices that C.S. Lewis used to enhance and augment his powers of retention. They are:
- Intensely focusing on his reading.
- Re-reading books.
- Minimizing trivial reading.
- Using text annotation extensively.
- Putting the “Art of Memory” into effect.
The Ability to Focus Intently Upon His Reading
“The true art of memory is the art of attention.”
– Samuel Johnson
In an earlier post I shared an observation made by Lewis’ Oxford friend and peer, Helen Gardner. As she would sit near him in the Duke Humfrey’s Library watching in awe and admiration as he read with stunning concentration, she observed:
“One sometimes feels that the word ‘unreadable’ had no meaning for him. To sit opposite him in Duke Humphrey when he was moving steadily through some huge double-columned folio in his reading for his Oxford history was to have an object lesson in what concentration meant. He seemed to create a wall of stillness around him.”
There can be no doubt this ability to center his mind intensively upon what he was reading had a significant impact upon his ability to fully comprehend the author’s meaning and perfectly retain the author’s words.
Is there anything we can do to emulate this? Find a quiet place to read? Read while our body and mind are alert? Open our mind to receive the author’s meaning? Turn off the cell phone and television? All of these, I think, would be helpful.
Lewis Reread Books
By my estimate, Lewis read approximately 20,000 books over the course of his life. His ability to recite text perfectly from memory was legendary. From this it might be construed that he only needed to read a book once to commit it to permanent memory. However, Lewis reread many books, some many times.
We know this because there are anecdotes reported by his friends. In Alister Fowler’s personal reflection on Lewis (as reported in C.S. Lewis Remembered by Harry Lee Poe and Rebecca Whitten Poe) Fowler confirmed that Lewis reread many of his “private canon” books more than one time. Fowler pointed to citations in Lewis’ own books of the dates when a book was read, then reread, with some books being read five or more times. Fowler also mentioned George Meredith’s Egoist as one that Lewis reread every year. I suspect there were others.
In his published writings Lewis counseled us to read books multiple times.
“An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only.”
– From “On Stories”
“I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”
– From a letter to Arthur Greaves
In An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis distinguished between two types of readers:
“The majority never read anything twice. The sure mark of an unliterary man is that he considers ‘I’ve read it already’ to be a conclusive argument against reading a work. We have all known women who remembered a novel so dimly that they had to stand for half an hour in the library skimming through it before they were certain they had once read it. But the moment they became certain, they rejected it immediately. It was for them dead, like a burnt-out match, an old railway ticket, or yesterday’s paper; they had already used it. Those who read great works, on the other hand, will read the same work ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of their life.”
In his classic How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler (a contender for “most erudite person in history”) recommended that readers should read a book three times to fully engage it. Adler said we cannot grasp the full meaning of a book in one reading.
According to Professor Peter Kreeft, the measure of great books is that:
“They are unclear on first reading, clearer on each subsequent reading; and while they instruct the reader with each rereading they are never really finished.”
Will rereading books enable us to memorize the entire text of a book? Not hardly. I have read several of Lewis’ books and shorter writings as many as forty times, including The Problem of Pain, The Great Divorce, The Abolition of Man, “Transposition” and “The Weight of Glory”. To date, I have memorized precisely none of them. But then I reread them not to burn the text permanently into my memory, but to discern Lewis’ deeper meaning more fully. It works.
Oxford professor, Alister McGrath, in his superb biography C.S. Lewis: A Life notes this fact about Lewis:
“Lewis, it seems, could remember texts primarily because he had absorbed their deep inner logic. His diaries bear witness to his habit of reading an astonishing number of texts; his personal library contains annotations indicating when a book was first read, and then read again. He was good at explaining complex ideas to others, because he had first explained them to himself. . . Lewis achieved this result partly by neglecting other sources of reading—such as daily newspapers.”
Lewis Avoided Trivial Reading
“A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.”
– Clifton Fadiman, former Chief Editor of Simon and Schuster
Lewis did not so much forget the trivial, he never read it to begin with. For example, it was reported by friends that Lewis never read newspapers.
This might seem a simple solution, but I doubt many of us put it into practice. Some of us no longer subscribe to newspapers and magazines because other media alternatives are quicker and come at no cost. We read news reports and editorials on a wide range of websites. Worse yet, we watch television endlessly and videos on YouTube. Worst of all, our eyes are hopelessly locked onto our cell phones and tablets to keep up with the trivial information on social media.
Author Alan Noble (a member of the C.S. Lewis Forum) woke me up to this crisis of distraction in our secular age. In his insightful book Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age, Professor Noble argued:
“The persistent distraction of our culture prevents us from asking the deepest, most important questions about existence and truth. The things that prick our souls for the sake of the gospel (e.g., death, beauty, anxiety, etc.) can be numbed quickly by an eight-hour dose of binge-watching ‘The Office’. We effortlessly avoid asking the biggest, most difficult questions of life because we are so busy. . . Even if we wanted to siphon time for introspection, we struggle to tell the difference between what matters most and what doesn’t matter at all. The space between the trivial and the crucial has shrunk. Everything is important all of the time, and you are obligated to keep up.”
The comfort offered by our modern “high-tech” world also brings with it an unavoidable distraction. Our brains are “conditioned” to redistribute our limited focus across a thousand things at once. We try to adapt by multitasking, but there’s no such thing as multitasking when it comes to contemplative thought.
Lewis avoided all that low-value-add, meaninglessly nonsense. We would be well-advised to curtail our intake of this trivia as well. Sadly, it is increasingly difficult to block out the noise.
Lewis Used Text Annotation Extensively
“A good memory is not so good as a little ink.”
– Chinese Proverb
How does this relate to C.S. Lewis? He possessed unparalleled powers of retention, but he supplemented his memory with annotations.
From among his “private canon,” Lewis read books of both types multiple times—fiction and nonfiction alike. Fictional literature he read purely for entertainment—George MacDonald and J.R.R Tolkien, for example. I suspect he seldom used annotation in fiction books. But Lewis also read nonfiction books profusely for edification—G.K. Chesterton and Owen Barfield, for example. I suspect he nearly always used annotation in nonfiction books, at least those he owned.
To appreciate Lewis’ deep research, we must note the way he annotated his books. His use of underscoring was minimal, preferring instead to use annotations recorded in the margins or on blank pages. At the top of each page, he typically wrote a one-line summary description of the topical content of that page. Often at the end of a book, Lewis would summarize key points in a structured and thorough précis. Annotations were recorded in miniscule, penciled script handwriting. (Lewis expert and C.S. Lewis Forum member, Charlie Starr, has conducted important research on the evolution of Lewis handwriting.) It is a beautiful thing to behold Lewis’ annotations. I have done so many times.
Earlier in this series, I revealed that I have made frequent visits the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to gain access to the Walter Hooper Collection. Over the course of these visits, I perused as many as fifty of Lewis’ books such as:
– The Republic by Plato
– De Rerum Natura by Lucretius
– On the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity by Richard Hooker
– A Serious Call to the Devout and Holy by William Law
In the earlier post I shared a story of how my review of Lewis’ personal copy of Plato’s Republic confirmed that Lewis did read ancient and medieval books in the author’s original language. That was interesting.
Other books produced different insights. By reading Lewis’ marginalia and the precis he put in the back of most books, I was able to see how his thinking progressed as he made his way through each book.
What was interesting about De Rerum Natura by Lucretius was seeing where Lewis had inscribed comments indicating that he come to see Lucretius as a flawed thinker. This was a book Lewis cherished as a young atheist, but later rejected it out of hand, dismissing Lucretius as “insufficient”. Lewis wrote a lengthy reflection on a blank page in the book:
“The poem is the work of an unbalanced mind. No reader can have failed to note the atmosphere of weirdness and terror which, while it does not prevent him from joining hands with Wordsworth and Milton, allies Lucretius with Edgar Allen Poe or Aurelius . . .”
What was interesting about On the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity by Richard Hooker was the highly detailed Précis, or index, he used to summarize the major points in the book. This included a graphic model that Lewis drew to capture Hooker’s key ideas.
What was interesting about A Serious Call by William Law was the underscoring of text which later showed up in Lewis’ own works, such as this direct quote from Law in The Problem of Pain:
“If you will here stop and ask yourselves why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you, that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.”
To be sure, Lewis had unparalleled powers of retention, However, I think it is quite likely his comprehension of the “deep inner logic” of books and his perfect retention of text and were greatly enhanced by his practice on annotating text. Perhaps Lewis proved the Chinese proverb is true: “A good memory is not so good as a little ink, er, pencil.”
We should follow Lewis’ lead on this. To that end, I purchase eBooks almost exclusively. Why? Because I can highlight text that inspires me. Better yet, I can record my own personal thoughts (epiphanies and insights) directly into the eBook as notes. These electronic annotations are easily accessible, which enables me to conduct a quick review whenever I want to refresh my memory. How great is that?
Lewis Put the “Art of Memory” into Effect
In the very last sentence of my most recent post, I made a comment: “Memory is more like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle than a photograph.” We have come to the point where I will attempt to explain this metaphor. This practice might just be the primary reason for C.S. Lewis’ unparalleled memory.
In the most recent post, I spoke of the phenomenon that is often labeled “photographic memory.” Mislabeled, I think, for I do not believe it is real. More importantly, according to Larry R. Squire (the University of California, San Diego Professor of neurosciences and a recognized thought-leader on the science of memory) the brain simply does not work this way. According to Professor Squire:
“Memory is more like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle than a photograph. To recollect a past event, we piece together various remembered elements and typically forget parts of what happened. We are good at remembering the gist of what happened and less good at remembering (photographically) all the elements of a past scene.”
I believe this relates to the “Art of Memory,” a mnemonic technique invented by the ancient Greeks which is also known as:
- Ars Memorativa
- The Method of Loci
- Memory Palace
- Memory Theatre
- Memory Journey
- Mnemonics (or Mnemonotechnics)
To the ancient Greeks poets and philosophers, a trained memory was of vital importance. To that end, they created an elaborate memory system, based on an imaginal technique of impressing “places” and “images” contiguously in a combined image in the memory.
This “method of loci” is a strategy of memory enhancement which uses visualizations of familiar spatial environments to enhance the recall of information. It is a mnemonic device invented by ancient Greek orators to help them remember not only the full range of topics that to be covered in an oration, but also organizing them in the correct sequence.
It is likely we are all familiar with variations on this technique, and perhaps even used them. In essence, it is the imaginative process whereby we utilize the layout of a “place” that is familiar to us and ideally this place has various discrete items (or loci) that are also known to us. We then “associate” (combine) our mental image of this item (the loci) alongside a second mental image that we created to represent the specific subject material to be recalled.
When desiring to remember a set of items the subject physically “walks” through this place, calling into his imagination these “loci” at which point he mentally links a second item to each loci by forming a new image of the subject matter that is to be recalled later. The two images are indelibly linked in the mind.
Retrieval of subject matter is achieved later by mentally “walking” through the “place”, calling into mind the “loci,” which then activates in his imagination the “contiguous image” of the desired subject matter.
For example, in “playback mode”, we might start at the front door of our home, then slowly move (mentally) through the entry foyer and into the various rooms of our home. With each step or advance we mentally recall an loci, or household item, in that location—a rug, a lamp, a painting, a mirror, a piece of furniture—and mentally associate with that household some previously conceived mental image that relates to the specific topic to be recalled.
This “place” can be either indoors or outdoors, though it is more common to use interiors of homes or other architectural structure. A tour through your home might be thought of as a “Memory Palace” or a “Memory Theatre”. A tour through a garden or down some favorite trail or path is considered a “Memory Journey”.
The point is that the image in your mind’s eye of the familiar loci (the lamp or painting) quickly calls up the mental image of the topic mentally associated with it. This works because your mind tends to have immediate and accurate recall of such combined images seared into your memory. The “seared image” is not permanent, but it lasts long enough in the mind to fulfill its intended purpose, delivering a speech perhaps.
Confirmation that Lewis fully understood this mnemonic technique and used frequently it is (once again) confirmed by his friends. Continuing the remembrance by Alister Fowler, in C.S. Lewis Remembered:
“Tynan’s anecdote [the memory challenge] usefully suggests the sort of memory involved; not memory by rote (although Lewis had plenty of that) but something more like the Renaissance ars memorativa, depending on ‘places’ in texts. It was not principally memoria ad verba but rather ad res—memory of the substance, aimed at grasp of contents through their structure.”
In a similar way, Alister McGrath, in his biography of C.S. Lewis noted:
“One of Lewis’s abilities must be noted here, for it is of obvious relevance to his gifts as a writer: his formidable memory. Lewis’ mastery of the Renaissance skill of the ars memorativa unquestionably contributed to the success of his Oxford lectures, enabling him to recite quotes from memory.”
So, how does all this relate to my comment that “memory is more like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that a picture”? The “association”, or mutual linking, of images in the Memory Theatre is somewhat akin to the outer edges of separate pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. What we see on that outer edge enables us to locate the piece of the jigsaw puzzle that fits next to it. Within our memory, this juxta-positioning of ideas together enables us to proceed from the current piece to the next piece, and to the next one after that.
This is true whether the nature of the imaginative tool in our memory is visual or aural. Consider how we recall the lyrics of our favorite rock oldies . . . we recall the next phrase in the song (its lyrics and its melody) because we initially have in mind the previous phrase in the song (including its lyrics and melody). Associated images—visual and/or aural–link to one another like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.
Back in 1974, the first book that I purchased after completing my undergraduate studies at Indiana University was The Memory Book by Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas, the Hall of Fame basketball player. The authors never mentioned “The Art of Memory”, but the book was entirely about the use of mental associations to link together important facts and burn them into your memory. I read this book closely and mastered the techniques. Before long I was performing “magic” feats of memory (mostly cheap card tricks) that amazed family and friends alike. Of course, there was nothing magic about it.
These mnemonic tactics really do work.
My next post will address the final major assessment criteria: What did Lewis accomplish with all that “literary learning”?
Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23
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