At Capacity: If we can’t remember the things we read and watch and even loved, do they still “count”?
By Melissa Kirsch
Everyone I know seems to be talking about their memory lately, how it isn’t what it used to be. Mine isn’t, and there’s some comfort in commiseration. Yes, we’re getting older, isn’t it something to observe, how we can no longer so easily recall names or events or what it was we were just about to say.
My memory used to be so good I’d have to hide it so it didn’t weird people out. I’d pretend not to remember someone’s full name and their kids’ names and how they used to own a coffee shop outside Albany, lest they think I’d freakishly compiled a dossier on them after our brief conversation at a party three years ago. Now, I’m rewatching a TV series I remember liking in 2022 because I can’t remember even the broadest outline of the plot. I constantly jot notes on stuff that used to surface in the normal churn of my brain’s functioning: funny remarks people make, bits of gossip, summaries of conversations. I take minutes on my own life.
Sure, age probably has a lot to do with it. For a while, I blamed quarantine and stress for dulling my edge (one friend suggested I might be in my “butter knife era”). But lately the metaphor that seems most apt is that of a computer: It feels as if my hard drive is full. I’m reading and watching and listening to so much content — in addition to living life and having actual experiences, never mind daydreams and nightmares and extended reveries — that it seems I’m running out of disk space. I can’t count on things to auto-save anymore. Since I can’t selectively delete stuff the way I would with an actual hard drive, I’m left creating backups in notebooks, mistrusting my own outmoded technology.
I’m particularly interested in how a full hard drive is affecting my consumption of culture. Cultural omnivores keep lists of the books they’ve read and the movies they’ve watched, adding to their knowledge and fluency with each item checked off. As I went through The Times’s recent list of the 100 best books of the century, I was gratified by how many I’d read but wondered if a book still counted if I couldn’t remember much about it.
What does it mean for a book, a show, an experience to “count,” anyway? Do you need to be able to recall the plot in detail? Should you be able to describe scenes or bits of dialogue, larger themes, cultural relevance? Or is it enough to just remember enjoying a book, or to be able to conjure a feeling it inspired? I was mulling these questions when I came across this essay by James Collins from 2010. In it, he describes books that he loved about which he remembers nothing: “All I associate with them is an atmosphere and a stray image or two, like memories of trips I took as a child.”
Collins suspected, as I do, that the books he can’t remember must have had an effect on his brain anyway, that the experience of reading and engaging with the texts must have changed him in some deeper way, leaving “a kind of mental radiation — that continues to affect me even if I can’t detect it.” I want to believe that my immersion in the fascinating characters and rich plot of “Creation Lake” by Rachel Kushner are performing some kind of alchemy in my brain even if — and it seems unthinkable, halfway through the book — I am likely to forget it all.
Maryanne Wolf, a neuroscientist, confirmed for Collins that inability to recall a book’s details shouldn’t be taken as evidence that we didn’t assimilate it in some way. “We can’t retrieve the specifics, but to adapt a phrase of William James’s, there is a wraith of memory,” she told him. “The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it.” More computer parallels!
After reading Collins’s essay, I did what I always do when someone’s writing resonates with me — I looked him up. I found a charming 2008 article about him and his home in Virginia, learned about a book he wrote, which the Times review called “a great big sunny lemon chiffon pie of a novel,” and reserved it from the library. This, I realized, 15 minutes and six open tabs into my digression, is why my brain’s coffers are bursting. There’s too much information, and I’m absolutely helpless to resist it. I look forward to reading Collins’s novel, and I look forward to remembering absolutely none of it.