This synopsis may sound like it belongs to a fantasy novel, but it’s actually the plot of Joshua Foer’s thrilling non-fiction Moonwalking with Einstein.
The art of memory, according to legend, began in the wake of
a catastrophe. In ancient Greece, an earthquake wiped out a palace, killing
everyone inside. The destruction was so total that no one could identify their
loved ones’ remains. Moments before the earthquake, however, the poet Simonides
had stepped outside the palace and surveying the rubble, he had a revelation: he
could visualize the entire undamaged building and everyone in it. “At that
moment,” Foer tells us, “the art of memory was born.”
What Simonides ostensibly did then on the fly, his successors do intentionally and only after great practice. For the memory artist, familiar
walking routes and well-known buildings become mental storage houses for
memories. Whatever things need be memorized—digits of pi, items on a grocery
list, or lines from “The Waste Land”—are converted into a series of memorable
images that are packed into the memory palace. A poker hand becomes for Foer a
stroll through his palace’s hallway where Michael Jackson defecates a salmon
burger and farts into a balloon.
The vulgarity of Foer’s imagery is nothing new to the art of
memory. Moonwalking takes us through
the art’s history, when Catholic monks conjured up lurid images to remember
devotional passages. Religion and the art of memory, we learn, often intertwined throughout history,
as Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Buddhists all passed down sacred teachings
through memory techniques. With the advent of the printing press, however, the
Golden Age of Memory came to an end as human memorization was largely replaced by what
Foer calls external memories—books, newspapers, videos, and the like.
As Foer discovers, however, the art of memory isn’t quite
dead yet. A group of dedicated memorizers across the globe annually pours their
way through decks of cards, literary passages, and binary codes (among other
things), stocking full huge memory palaces of their own creation. The memory
subculture is not without its internal drama, and along the way to becoming a
memorizer himself, Foer meets his fair share of foes, friends, liars, and
conmen. Both Foer’s naivety in this world contrasted with his later success as
well as the numerous “ordinary people” who make up the world’s top memorizers
give Moonwalking with Einstein a
seductive flair, suggesting that if the reader wished, he or she too could
become a master memorizer. As Foer furiously memorizes his way into the final
rounds of the U.S. Memory Championship, we root for his victory as if he were
an underdog boxer and wonder if we too could train our memories into that kind of shape.
Despite
the personal narrative and the enticing invitation to the reader, Moonwalking is neither memoir nor
self-help book. Foer the journalist ultimately presides over Foer the
protagonist, guiding us through a broader exploration of memory and its meaning
for humanity. We meet some individuals racked with mental disorders that leave them socially non-functional but with memories like a computer's. On the other side of the spectrum is a man like EP who cannot form any new memories and lives a life of constant forgetting. Such bizarre cases of human memory lead Foer to ponder memory's role in human identity and how such wide disparities in memory can be possible. Foer fuses together these moments of journalistic and philosophical investigation with his own immersion into the world of memory training. The end product is a work of non-fiction that manages to be as thrilling as it
is intellectual.
I'm sold! Amazon, Barnes & Noble, library, it's a book, dude, you know the deal.
I'm sold! Amazon, Barnes & Noble, library, it's a book, dude, you know the deal.
