What does it mean to remember?
Retrieval in a laboratory. Plato’s anamnesis. Augustine’s palace. Hebrew zakar. Christian memorial. Islamic dhikr. Buddhist sati. A jay’s cache. A machine’s lookup. These are not one practice.
Philosophy
A bishop walks the inner rooms of his own mind and cannot find their floor.
The Palaces of Memory
Hippo Regius · c. 397–400
Ancient World
The Fire and the Wall
Men chained in a cave take shadows for the world.
Athens · c. 375 BCE
Sacred Traditions
When Knowledge Would Not Sit Still
The most celebrated teacher in Baghdad can no longer trust that he knows, and walks away from the lectern.
Baghdad, then Damascus and Tus · 1095
Sacred Traditions
A man sits down and vows not to rise until he has seen through the trouble of existing.
Beneath the Fig
Uruvelā, later Bodh Gayā · c. 5th century BCE
Animals
The Thief Who Remembers Being a Thief
A bird hides food, watches who is watching, and later recaches, as if it knows what another mind might do.
Western oak woodlands, and Cambridge aviaries · 1990s–2000s
Science
When the Lights Go Out
A person counts backward, the room continues, and later there is a hole in the life where the cutting was.
Operating theaters everywhere · 1846 to now
AI & Machines
A mathematician, tired of the question “can machines think?”, replaces it with a game that can be played.
The Imitation Game
Manchester, on the page of Mind · 1950
Philosophy
The Stream of Thought
A psychologist refuses to cut the mind into pieces that would make a textbook tidy, and names the flow instead.
Cambridge, Massachusetts · 1890
Ordinary Life
Star of Gladness
A canoe leaves Maui with no compass. The navigator who keeps it located learned the method on another island, in another language.
Honolua Bay, Maui, then the ocean toward Tahiti · 1976
Animals
American crows come to a dead crow. The paper’s title is danger, not a funeral. The gathering is still a fact.
They Gather to Learn
Seattle, and sites around it · 2015
Ordinary Life
The Word at the Pump
A child who cannot hear or see has water run over one hand while letters are spelled into the other. Something that was wet becomes a name.
Ivy Green, Tuscumbia · 1887
Ordinary Life
A Book in the Snow
A Sámi wolf-hunter dictates, to a Danish artist, the first book a Sámi writes about Sámi life. The weather in it is not a capital’s weather.
Guovdageaidnu / Kautokeino, and the pages written in a turf hut · 1910
Art & Literature
An Andean noble writes and draws a thousand-page letter to a Spanish king: a world, a conquest, a way of seeing that will not arrive in Madrid.
A Letter the King Might See
The Andes, on the manuscript now in Copenhagen · c. 1615
Science
A Memory That Would Not Thin
In Moscow a psychologist follows a man who cannot forget a list. The gift is also a clogging. Ordinary forgetting, it turns out, is a kind of mercy.
Moscow · 1920s–1968
Ancient World
The Places of the Guests
A poet leaves a banquet. The roof falls. He names the dead by where they had been sitting. Memory, in the later telling, becomes a house of places.
Thessaly, as Cicero tells it · as told; written 55 BCE
Ordinary Life
Marigold, water, salt, bread, a photograph. A night in Mexico when the dead are fed. Memory here is a table, not a test.
A Place Set for the Living Who Were
Mexico, in homes and cemeteries · 1–2 November, as practiced