Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

THE BOOK OF MEMORY
am standing on the ruins of Carthage, in Tunisia. The stones are Roman, bits of walls built after the
city was destroyed by Scipio Aemilianus in 146 BC, when the Carthaginian empire became a Roman
province and was renamed Africa. Here Saint Augustine, as a young man, taught rhetoric before
travelling to Milan. In his late thirties he crossed the Mediterranean once again, to settle in Hippo, in
what is today Algeria; he died there in AD 430 as the invading Vandals were laying siege to the town.
I’ve brought with me my school edition of the Confessions, a thin, orange-covered volume of the
Classiques Roma, which my Latin teacher preferred to all other series. Standing here with the book in my
hand, I feel a certain camaraderie with the great Renaissance poet Francesco Petrarca, whom his Anglo-
Saxon readers called Petrarch, and who always used to carry with him a pocket-sized edition of
Augustine. Reading the Confessions, he felt that Augustine’s voice spoke to him so intimately that,
towards the end of his life, he composed three imaginary dialogues with the saint, which were published
posthumously as the Secretum meum. A pencilled note in the margin of my Roma edition comments on
Petrarch’s comments, as if continuing those imaginary dialogues.
It is true that something in Augustine’s tone suggests a comfortable intimacy, propitious for the sharing of
secrets. When I open the book, my marginal scribbles bring to mind the roomy classroom of the Colegio
Nacional de Buenos Aires, where the walls were painted the colour of Carthaginian sand, and I find
myself recalling the voice of my teacher reciting Augustine’s words, and our pompous debates (were we
fourteen, fifteen, sixteen?) about political responsibility and metaphysical reality. The book preserves the
memory of that far-away adolescence, of my teacher (now dead), of Petrarch’s readings of Augustine,
which our teacher read to us approvingly, but also of Augustine and his classrooms, of the Carthage that
was built on the Carthage that was destroyed, only to be destroyed once again. The dust of these ruins is
far, far older than the book, but the book contains it too. Augustine observed and then wrote what he
recalled. Held in my hand, the book twice remembers.
Perhaps it was his very sensuality (which he tried so hard to repress) that made Saint Augustine such a
keen observer. He seems to have spent the latter part of his life in a paradoxical state of discovery and
distraction, marvelling at what his senses taught him and yet asking God to remove from him the
temptations of physical pleasure. Ambrose’s silent reading habits were observed because Augustine
bowed to the curiosity of his eyes, and the words in the garden were heard because he indulged in the
scent of the grass and the song of invisible birds.
Not only the possibility of silent reading surprised Augustine. Writing about an early schoolmate, he
remarked on the man’s extraordinary memory, which enabled him to compose and recompose texts which
he had once read and learned by heart. He was capable, Augustine said, of quoting the next to last verse
of each book of Virgil, “quickly, in order and from memory.… If we then asked him to recite the verse
before each of those, he did. And we believed that he could recite Virgil backwards.… If we wanted even
prose passages from whatever Cicero oration he had committed to memory, that also he could do.”
Reading either in silence or aloud, this man was able to impress the text (in Cicero’s phrase, which
Augustine liked to quote) “on the wax tablets of memory”, to be recalled and recited at will in whatever
order he chose, as if he were flipping through the pages of a book. By recalling a text, by bringing to mind
a book once held in the hands, such a reader can become the book, from which he and others can read.
A Florentine school of the twelfth century. The students can be seen sharing their texts in groups of three.
(photo credit 4.1)
In 1658, the eighteen-year-old Jean Racine, studying at Port-Royal des Champs under the watchful eye of
religious teachers, discovered by chance an early Greek novel, The Loves of Theogonis and Charicles,
whose notions of tragic love he may have recalled years later, when writing Andromaque and Bérénice.
He took the book into the forest surrounding the abbey, and had begun to read it voraciously when he was
surprised by the sexton, who pulled the book from the boy’s hands and threw it into a bonfire. Shortly
afterwards, Racine managed to find a second copy, which was also discovered and condemned to the
flames. This encouraged him to buy a third copy and learn the whole novel by heart. Then he handed it

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over to the fiery sexton, saying, “Now you can burn this one too, just as you did the others.”
This quality of reading, which enables a reader to acquire a text not simply by perusing the words but by
actually making them part of the reader’s self, was not always considered a blessing. Twenty-three
centuries ago, just beyond the walls of Athens, in the shade of a tall plane tree by the edge of the river, a
young man of whom we know little more than his name, Phaedrus, read out to Socrates a speech by a
certain Lycias, whom Phaedrus passionately admired. The young man had heard the speech (on the duties
of a lover) several times, and in the end had obtained a written version of it which he studied over and
over again, until he had learned it by heart. Then, longing to share his discovery (as readers so often do),
he had sought an audience with Socrates. Socrates, guessing that Phaedrus was holding the text of the
speech hidden under his cloak, asked him to read the original rather than recite it for him. “I won’t let
you practise your oratory on me,” he said to the young enthusiast, “when Lycias himself is here present.”
The ancient dialogue dealt, above all, with the nature of love, but the conversation happily drifted and,
towards the end, the subject happened to be the craft of letters. Once upon a time, Socrates told
Phaedrus, the god Thoth of Egypt, inventor of dice, checkers, numbers, geometry, astronomy and writing,
visited the King of Egypt and offered him these inventions to pass on to his people. The king discussed the
merits and disadvantages of each of the god’s gifts, until Thoth came to the art of writing. “Here,” said
Thoth, “is a branch of learning that will improve their memories; my discovery provides a recipe for both
memory and wisdom.” But the king was not impressed. “If men learn this,” he told the god, “it will
implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they will rely on that
which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of
external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true
wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without
teaching them anything, you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they will know
nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their
fellow-men.” A reader, Socrates admonished Phaedrus, “must be singularly simple-minded to believe that
written words can do anything more than remind one of what one already knows.”
Phaedrus, convinced by the old man’s reasoning, agreed. And Socrates continued: “You know, Phaedrus,
that’s the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly analogous to painting. The painter’s work
stands before us as though the paintings were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most
majestic silence. It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to you as though they were
intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a wish to know more, they go on telling
you the same thing over and over again forever.” For Socrates, the text read was nothing but its words, in
which sign and meaning overlapped with bewildering precision. Interpretation, exegesis, gloss,
commentary, association, refutation, symbolic and allegorical senses, all rose not from the text itself but
from the reader. The text, like a painted picture, said only “the moon of Athens”; it was the reader who
furnished it with a full ivory face, a deep dark sky, a landscape of ancient ruins along which Socrates once
walked.
Towards the year 1250, in the preface to Bestiaire d’amour, the chancellor of the Cathedral of Amiens,
Richard de Fournival, disagreed with Socrates’ contention and suggested that, since all of humankind
desires knowledge and has but a short time to live, it must rely on the knowledge gathered by others to
increase the wealth of its own. To this effect, God gave the human soul the gift of memory, to which we
gain access through the senses of sight and hearing. De Fournival then elaborated on Socrates’ notion.
The road to sight, he said, consisted of peintures or pictures; the road to hearing of paroles or words. The
merit of these was found not in merely stating an image or text with no progress or variation, but in re-
creating in the reader’s own time and space that which had been conceived and rendered into pictures or
words in another age and under different skies. “When one sees painted a story, whether of Troy or
something else,” argued de Fournival, “one sees those noble deeds which were done in the past exactly as
though they were still present. And it is the same thing with hearing a text, for when one hears a story
read aloud, listening to the events one sees them in the present.… And when you read, this writing with
its peinture and parole will make me present to your memory, even when I am not physically before you.”
Reading, according to de Fournival, enriched the present and actualized the past; memory prolonged
these qualities into the future. For de Fournival, the book, not the reader, preserved and passed on
memory.
The written text, in Socrates’ time, was not a common tool. While books existed in Athens in considerable
numbers in the fifth century BC, and a trade in books had begun to develop, the practice of private
reading did not become fully established until at least a century later, in the time of Aristotle — one of the
first readers to assemble an important collection of manuscripts for his own use. Talk was the means by
which people learned and passed on learning, and Socrates belongs to a line of oral masters that includes
Moses, Buddha and Jesus Christ, who only once, we are told, wrote a few words in the sand and then
effaced them. For Socrates, books were aids to memory and knowledge but true scholars were to do
without them. A few years later, his disciples Plato and Xenophon recorded his disparaging opinion of
books in a book, and their memory of his memory was thereby preserved for us, his future readers.
In de Fournival’s day, students commonly used books as memory aids, setting the open pages in front of

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them in class, usually one copy for several students. In school I studied in the same manner, holding the
book open in front of me while the teacher lectured, marking the main passages that I would later try to
memorize (though a few teachers — followers of Socrates, I suppose — didn’t like us opening the books in
class). There was, however, one curious difference between my fellow students in the Buenos Aires high
school and the students depicted in the illustrations of de Fournival’s time. We marked passages in our
books in pen (if we were brave) or pencil (if we were squeamish), making notes in the margins to remind
us of the teacher’s comments. The thirteenth-century students in the old illustrations are mostly shown
without any writing material whatsoever; they stand or sit in front of the open codexes, memorizing the
position of a paragraph, the disposition of the letters, committing a sequence of essential points to
memory instead of entrusting them to the page. Unlike myself and my contemporaries, who would study
for a particular exam from the underlined and annotated passages (which would then, after the exam, be
largely forgotten, in the safe knowledge that the book would be there for consultation if it was ever
needed), de Fournival’s students relied on the library stored in their heads, from which, thanks to the
laborious mnemotechnics taught from their earliest years, they would be able to pick chapter and verse
as easily as I can find a given subject in a reference library of microchips and paper. They even believed
that memorizing a text was physically beneficial, and cited as an authority the second-century Roman
doctor Antyllus, who had written that those who have never learned verses by heart and must instead
resort to reading them in books sometimes have great pains in eliminating, through abundant
perspiration, the noxious fluids that those with a keen memory of texts eliminate merely through
breathing.
I instead confidently rely on the ability of computerized services to hunt through libraries vaster than
Alexandria’s for a remote piece of information, and my word-processor can “access” all manner of books.
Enterprises such as Project Gutenberg in the United States file on diskettes everything from
Shakespeare’s Complete Works to the CIA World Factbook and Roget’s Thesaurus, and the Oxford Text
Archive in England offers electronic versions of the major Greek and Latin authors, plus several classics
in various other languages. The medieval scholars relied on their own memory of the books they had read,
whose pages they could conjure up like living ghosts.
A single diskette of the complete works of Shakespeare in its various editions and adaptations, and its
codex-shaped packaging. (photo credit 4.2)
Saint Thomas Aquinas was a contemporary of de Fournival’s. Following recommendations made by Cicero
to improve the rhetorician’s ability to recall, he elaborated a series of memory rules for readers: placing
the things one wished to remember in a certain order, developing an “affection” for them, transforming
them into “unusual similitudes” that would render them easy to visualize, repeating them frequently.
Eventually the scholars of the Renaissance, improving on Aquinas’s method, suggested the mental
construction of architectural models — palaces, theatres, cities, the realms of heaven and hell — in which
to lodge whatever they wished to remember. These models were highly elaborate constructions, erected
in the mind over time and made sturdy through use, and proved for centuries to be immensely efficient.
For me, reading today, the notes I take while reading are held in the vicarious memory of my word-
processor. Like the Renaissance scholar who could wander at will through the chambers of his memory
palace to retrieve a quotation or a name, I blindly enter the electronic maze buzzing behind my screen.
With the help of its memory I can remember more accurately (if accuracy is important) and more
copiously (if quantity seems valuable) than my illustrious ancestors, but I must still be the one to find an
order in the notes and to draw conclusions. Also, I work in fear of losing a “memorized” text — a fear
which for my ancestors came only with the dilapidations of age, but which for me is always present: fear
of a power surge, a misdirected key, a glitch in the system, a virus, a defective disk, any of which might
erase from my memory everything for ever.
About a century after de Fournival completed his Bestiaire, Petrarch, who had apparently followed
Aquinas’s mnemotechnic devices the better to pursue his voluminous readings, imagined in the Secretum
meum entering a conversation with his beloved Augustine on the subject of reading and memory. Petrarch
had led, like Augustine, a turbulent life in his younger days. His father, a friend of Dante’s, had been
banished like the poet from his native Florence, and shortly after Petrarch’s birth had moved his family to
the court of Pope Clement V in Avignon. Petrarch attended the universities of Montpellier and Bologna,
and at the age of twenty-two, after his father’s death, he settled again in Avignon, a rich young man. But
neither the wealth nor the youth lasted long. In a few years of riotous living he squandered all of his
father’s inheritance, and was obliged to enter a religious order. The discovery of books by Cicero and
Saint Augustine awoke a taste for literature in the curious young man, and for the rest of his life he read
voraciously. He started writing seriously in his mid-thirties, composing two works, De viris illustribus (Of