Remember: Never, Ever Write Anything Down
Don’t let letters do the work your memory should
Watching the considerable response that Bret Stephens's column in the NYT has been getting, it occurred to me that a modest rhetorical exercise in estrangement might help the reader see that heartfelt piece in a new light.
This column is less an argument than a plea: please, do not write. Do not let marks in wax and skin do the work your memory was given to you to do.
Do not write it down — not the speech you are to deliver in court tomorrow, not the terms of a bargain, not a message to your father-in-law, not the words you owe the dead or the assembly. None of it. Do not hand your knowledge over to writing for safekeeping. Do not let it feed you your opening line, your transition, your close. Do not ask a scribe to take it down for you, and do not persuade yourself that saying written words aloud somehow makes them yours. It doesn’t.
The reason to give all this up is not that writing is dishonest in itself. It turns dishonest when it serves a deception: when you stand before the court with a speech another man composed and let your listeners believe the words were born in your own head. Name the author, and the charge loses its force.
And no — the point is not that memory, properly exercised, will one day hold more than a scroll. It won’t. A scroll keeps everything and forgets nothing, just as a horse outruns any messenger and a counting board never errs in its sums.
The danger of writing lies elsewhere: it weakens the mind. It is a cart you climb into without thinking when you ought to be going on foot — while you can still walk at all.
The further writing spreads, the more it eats away: at one man’s memory, yes, but also at the ability of a city’s citizens to reason together, at the keeping of an inheritance in living voices, and at last at our willingness to think any of it matters. The art of oral telling is dying in front of us as it is. Writing only quickens the decay of memory, carrying us deeper into the times the rhapsodes have already begun to call the age of forgetting.
What can memory do that a scroll cannot?
Memory requires presence.
It makes you think. Reading and copying, as a rule, do not. Memory demands that you carry knowledge inside you — keep it about your person, summon it at the moment it is wanted, answer when an awkward question comes — answer people who can see every hesitation.
Memory makes you speak plainly and in order, put things exactly, and answer for what you have said.
A line written in anger is forgiven more readily than the same words spoken to a man’s face. Precisely because to speak them is to become visible: to step forward, to be seen.
A spoken word has weight, because a man stands behind it.
We say I give you my word not because what has been said cannot be disputed, but because the one who said it is here, in front of us, and can be held to it.
But what happens when words turn into marks and the man who wrote them walks away?
They become orphans.
Put a question to a scroll and it will say nothing, and it will answer. Ask again, and it repeats the same thing in the same order, endlessly. A scroll does not know who ought to read it and who ought not. A scroll cannot stand up for itself. There is no one to stand beside it and explain what was meant.
Picture the father of the bride reading his wedding toast off a tablet. Whatever smoothness the writing lends his words, it takes exactly that much of a father from his daughter: his eyes are fixed on the wax, and they do not see her on the happiest day of her life.
Now picture the daughter finding out that her father did not grow those words out of himself, never carried them inside him — that all along they had been lying in cold wax, dead as a moth in amber. Is she not right to be wounded by her own father’s display of indifference? Is it any wonder she cries?
Many will say, of course, that a wedding toast is one thing and a dreary inventory of property or a catalogue of ships quite another. But the memory you exercise on a plain list is the same memory that holds a wedding toast and a funeral oration.
We remember what matters better because we keep making ourselves remember what doesn’t. We think better when we remember, because the daily work of the mind demands an attention we would never give to trifles once they had been run through the indifferent stylus of a scribe. We grow more inventive by exercising memory on even the most ordinary words — and in a list of provisions as much as in a sage’s argument, a human voice can be heard.
Lately it has been growing fainter and fainter.
Of a hundred youths examined at the gymnasium this spring, fifty-six could not carry a single book of Homer without a tablet at the elbow, and nineteen could not hold a hundred lines. The old teachers say that breaking pupils of reading off the wax is like stopping a burst dam with your finger.
The easiest thing is to call it cheating. But cheating is too small a word, too slight a word, for what is happening to us. What is at stake is not merely the honesty of a contest, nor merely the raising of the young. What is at stake is the ability of the polis to govern itself.
The link between memory and free government is plain enough. Men who can hold the laws and the precedents in their heads, weigh arguments calmly in the middle of a noisy agora, and meet objections with dignity — without such men, rule by the people is not possible.
But if we go on sinking into forgetfulness, what will become of us?
What becomes of us when a citizen can no longer follow an argument that runs longer than what fits on the tablet clutched in his hand? When he cannot answer what he has heard, because he has never exercised — day by day, a little at a time — the one thing without which no answer is possible: the ability to hold another man’s thought in mind long enough to turn it over and look at it from several sides?
The outlines of that new world are already showing through.
Speeches are bought like cloth, by the cubit: composed by men who will never appear in the court down on the agora; delivered by men who never thought them through; and swallowed whole, without a moment’s reflection, by jurors in their hundreds.
That was already the shape of the world a generation ago, when writing had not yet got in everywhere. How much further have we gone since — we who have unlearned how to hold an argument in memory, weigh words in the mind, answer for what we say?
The next time you want to write something down — the terms of a bargain, the words of a song, an argument, a reply owed to a friend — hold back, I beg you.
Speak the words. Learn the words. Carry the words with you.
Every time you choose memory over writing, you do something worthy of a free man, a responsible citizen, a capable soldier.
Every extra hour given over to learning by heart is a blow struck at once against the makers of lying speeches; against the greedy craftsmen who compete in the sharpness of their styluses as though these were swords and arrows; and against the unthinking, indifferent scribes. It is a human thing, a deeply personal act of resistance to evil, in a world that is ever more surely forgetting how to remember.