Funes the Memorious
- a tale of one man's accident (head injury falling from a horse),
resulting in a dramatic transformation of his perceptions and memory -
Funes can remember absolutely everything with astonishing clarity, each
moment of his entire past life in exquisite detail, not only seeing in
his mind's eye every leaf of every tree but each and every time he
imagined a leaf or a tree.
Think about it - what makes you you?
Philosophers throughout history have devoted much of their thinking to
the nature of personal identity. One key element philosophers (and also
psychologists) return to again and again: memory.
Ah, memory -
how much of you would be left if you woke up one day without your
memory, that is, an inability to remember even one detail of your past
life? Or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, how much of you would be
remain if you woke up with the supercharged memory of Funes?
Paralyzed
from the neck down, Funes now spends his life in his bed, passing the
time with such things as recollecting a day of his childhood. Of course,
with his laser sharp memory, it takes Funes an entire day to call to
mind all the minutiae of that day.
Funes also teaches himself
foreign languages. "With no effort, he had learned English, French,
Portuguese and Latin." The narrator, a man resembling Borges himself,
goes on: "I suspect, however, that he was not very capable of thought.
To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. in the
teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in
their presence."
Reflecting on the Funes' gift regarding
language, a person aside, if I may. I have a specific dyslexia in
learning any foreign language - try as I might, I can not retain in my
memory words or phrases from a language other than English. Thus I'm
locked into being monolingual. Drat! If I only had a fraction of Funes'
ability to instantly learn a foreign language.
But there's an
upside: I'm compensated by my capacity to remember the content of the
books I've read (especially short stories and novels) stretching back
over the past fifty years as if I read those books last week, an ability
that comes in mighty handy for a book reviewer.
So, what if I
was given a choice: gain a special ability to learn foreign languages
but lose the facility to remember the books I've read or will read; in
other words, in one ear and out the other?
I keep this choice in mind whenever I reread Funes the Memorious.
Online link to Borges' tale: http://vigeland.caltech.edu/ist4/lect...
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