“What you have by heart … they cannot take it from you … What you don't know by heart, you really haven't loved deeply enough.”
—George Steiner
I used to resent rote memorization at my boyhood Catholic school. I always wanted to know the “why” of something, the heart of the matter, rather than the surface. I especially resented memorizing something because a teacher or priest said so – whether multiplication tables, random dates in history, or the prayers of the rosary.
Yet, as a good little student, I would do it anyway, eventually discovering how to memorize a subject just enough to ace the test, only to quickly jettison the information from my memory banks soon after.
I learned how to wield information to my situational advantage, without ever truly grasping the information itself. Some subjects stuck, usually the things that actually interested me, but most subjects I treated as garbage in, garbage out.
Though not exactly admirable, this technique of learning to soon forget proved useful as I progressed through college. Today, it’s essential in the talk radio business.
What’s more, this technique of learning to soon forget meshes nicely with the technological progress happening around me. Why memorize much of anything when the information is always right at my fingertips? After all, progress in a technological sense often means forgetting what everyone once knew, as old ways give way to new.
For instance, how many of you reading this know how to grow your own food? I suspect few. I bet most of you would have a very hard time remembering how, if you ever knew!
And why would you? The more specialized knowledge and skills a society gains, the more the individual is free to forget and rely on systems of which he is mostly ignorant.
In our increasingly complex technological society, there is simply too much information for any one person to know. But the beauty of modern technological progress is that someone or something in the system does know – or is, at least, working on it – prepared to furnish the ignorant individual with readymade answers.
Just think of the digital garden being built right before our eyes with accelerating haste. Every earthly delight (or depravity) is just a few taps of the screen away. Every insight is ready to be summoned in the palm of your hand. Even if you forget too much, even if you never took the time to learn much of anything at all, you can always find some ready-made answer right at your fingertips.
Soon, the system may progress enough to do your thinking for you – algorithms and artificial intelligence swiftly anticipating and curating whatever you may choose – if it hasn’t already.
What progress! Less to memorize (how many phone numbers do you remember anymore?) and much less to do! Here’s to more robots taking our jobs soon!
Yet, something feels off, like a prayer rote-memorized and parroted only to be forgotten in silence.
Progress often means forgetting what everyone once knew, as old ways give way to new. Yet, progress can also mean remembering what has always been true.
Some things should never be forgotten or outsourced to any system outside of you. Some things must be known by heart, etched in soul, ready to shape and strengthen a man against his own proclivity to wickedness or any manmade system of control.
What a man has by heart cannot be touched, cannot be taken away. Caught up in a system where everything is just a few taps away, what a man truly loves is what he puts to heart.
I still resent rote memorization. Yet, I resent myself more for treating my memory like that of a machine, swift to learn techniques that helped me forget soon after the momentary need had passed.
Just because something has been memorized doesn’t mean it’s written on the heart, but what you put to heart can never be taken away from you – not even by you.
There is much I memorized from my Catholic school days, much I tried to forget and tried to take away – much that I would say aloud for years without meaning a word, followed by years where the words got so quiet they could not be heard until they seemed forgotten in silence.
Yet, of late, I find the words have returned – and despite my worst efforts, are still written on my heart:
“Our Father, who art in heaven…”
Joey Clark is a native Alabamian and is currently the host of the radio program News and Views on News Talk 93.1 FM WACV out of Montgomery, AL, M-F 12 p.m. - 3 p.m. His column appears every Tuesday in 1819 News. To contact Joey for media or speaking appearances, as well as any feedback, please email [email protected]. Follow him on X @TheJoeyClark or watch the radio show livestream.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to [email protected].
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