Rereading, re-remembering and perhaps re-forgetting.

From Are you one of those people who eat the same thing every day? by Ann Althouse.

She is discussing an issue about which I have been thinking lately - the order and construct of remembering facts (and forgetting).

I ran across that article yesterday as we were discussing the sense of smell in this post about a man who had anosmia and then regained his sense of smell and experienced smell as much more intense than it is for a person who'd never been smell deprived. Commenters brought up dogs, and I wanted to talk about the Oliver Sacks essay, "The Dog Beneath the Skin," a chapter in "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," about a man who takes drugs that leave him with a heightened sense of smell and the feeling that it was like being a dog.

I felt surprised to see in that 2015 article that the dog-man in question was Sacks himself, a fact he'd chosen to hide when he published "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat." ("I’m, um… less – less shy now. I think partly I’m at a distance from these things. They were 40 years ago. And I don’t think it’s sensationalism or exhibitionism for its own sake – so much as the fact that I am basically constituted the same as everybody else, and I will get an inside take, as well as a scientific one.") This revelation is in Sacks's memoir, "On the Move: A Life," which I've read, so I should not have been surprised. I mean, I know I forget most of what I read, but I do think that having read something once ought to keep you from feeling surprised to see it when it comes up again. It should be more of a feeling of oh, yeah, I'd forgotten that.

There are levels of forgetting, I realize. Let's say you encounter, once again, a fact you've have heard before. Level 1: Oh, yes, I remember. (You forgot only in the sense that you had no reason to call the fact to mind, but it looks completely familiar). Level 2: Oh, I'd forgotten that. (You remember that you've seen it before.) Level 3: I don't think I've ever seen that before. (You may have seen it, but you don't remember.) Level 4: I'm sure I've never seen that before. (You seem to remember that you have never known it. This may be based on reasoning that it's the sort of thing that if you'd heard it before, you would remember.)

The reason I have been reflecting on the topic is due to a rereading of Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. I read her big works (Guns of August, Proud Tower, A Distant Mirror) when I was in my mid-twenties plus or minus a couple of years. Roughly thirty years ago.

I had already read a fair amount about both World War I as well as the late middle ages by the time I got to Tuchman so what I learned from her books was not new material but a consolidation and an awareness of alternate interpretations. A gifted writer, she certainly managed to contextualize and synthesize much of what I knew and I particularly enjoyed reading her.

With age, rheumatism, and smaller planes, I find it less and less convenient to read books, particularly the doorstops which I enjoy, while traveling. Which is regrettable given the amount of time I spend on planes given my profession. Having lately been on a routine route in a particularly small plane for some months, I finally began using a Kobo which was given to me some years ago. Screen reading is no substitute to real reading of books, but it is a close enough proxy that it is an acceptable substitute under the right conditions.

And frankly I have been enjoying reading and rereading clunkers which have never been physically convenient to read in confined spaces.

And so I come to reread Guns of August.

First, it is a reminder of how gifted a writer Tuchman was, what a gift for signal events, and what a deadpan talent in making brief understated, ironic/humorous statements freighted with insight and perspective.

Second, I am experiencing all four levels described by Althouse. Stuff I know and Tuchman is saying more artfully. Things which I know but had not recently thought about. Events I know I knew but would not have been able to easily call to mind. And consequential things which I know I must have known (because I have read this book before with respect and diligence) but which apparently went into the brain and immediately dissipated.

I do not understand how people can reflect on the complexity, wonder, and fallibility of our world and ourselves without having at least some modicum of humility.