Adventures in Memory by Hilde Østby

Author:Hilde Østby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2018-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

— 6 —

THE ELEPHANT’S GRAVEYARD

Or: The art of forgetting

I stand amid the roar

Of a surf-tormented shore,

And I hold within my hand

Grains of the golden sand—

How few! yet how they creep

Through my fingers to the deep,

While I weep—while I weep!

O God! can I not grasp

Them with a tighter clasp?

O God! can I not save

One from the pitiless wave?

Is all that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?

EDGAR ALLAN POE,

“A Dream Within a Dream”

BERLIN, 1879. THE city’s most prominent citizens promenade beside the river Spree. Along Unter den Linden, they sit at outdoor cafés, enjoying the warm weather and the blossoming linden trees. They rearrange their dresses and their top hats and breathe in the spring smells: horse manure in the street and fresh-baked pretzels. The abundant foliage casts shadows on the ground.

“What a wonderful time!” these bourgeois may be thinking beneath the tree canopy in Berlin. “I wonder if this particular moment will stay with me for life. Will I remember the breeze making the linden trees sway, when I think back on this a year from now, five years, twenty years? How much of this will I forget?”

Meanwhile, in a laboratory at the University of Berlin, a lone researcher is about to begin a groundbreaking experiment. He is going to attempt something never before tried in history. He is not going to conquer a mountain, invent the lightbulb, or travel to the Moon. Nobody in high school history class will read about what he is going to do. But in the history of psychology, he will be hailed as a great hero, a man who walked where no one had walked before. Hermann Ebbinghaus will be remembered forever for his efforts to do something completely ordinary—forget. While Berlin’s upper classes stroll the river in the spring sun, Ebbinghaus feeds his memory with meaningless syllables. BOS—DIT—YEK—DAT. He studies them intensely and tests himself, hour after hour, day after day, until he can repeat every list of twenty-five nonsense words in the right order. While life unfolds outside the University of Berlin, Ebbinghaus immerses himself in syllables. He’s chosen to study empty combinations of letters because they are completely free of the troublesome contamination of emotions, ideas, and his own life. He tests how much he can still remember after a third of an hour, an hour, nine hours, a day, two days, six days, and thirty-one days.

He wants to find out how fast he forgets; it’s as simple as that. Sure, outside of psychology circles, this may not seem like an accomplishment worthy of much celebration. We can plant a flag on the South Pole, but we can’t do the same with the act of forgetting—we can’t discover it and declare, Here it is! While Solomon Shereshevsky could make a living and earn applause by remembering superhumanly long lists of words and numbers, nobody would pay a nickel to see Ebbinghaus stand onstage and forget. It’s safe to say that he had undertaken an unglamorous task. Though what he did wasn’t particularly exciting on the surface, it was actually quite sensational.

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