Playing with Sticks

The last book I read was “The Sense of an Ending” by Julian Barnes. The irony of this is that I used to work at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin, which houses the Barnes archive, and at the time, I had not read him. Now, I feel foolish, but with 36 million mss. and papers to chose from, some have to fall by the wayside. So, most likely next time I am in Austin, I may be going to the HRC as a visitor to view the archive…funny how that works.

The book itself is nothing spectacular when it comes to narrative and the prose is very subdued, but for a reason. It deals with Memory, or the lack thereof as well as the question of what can we really know about the Past and how reliable is History, or more so, how reliable are the sources of History, especially when it comes to personal histories of people whom we have known. How reliable is the Human Brain when it comes to re-constructing a personal history when suddenly what we had thought was the “truth” all along, suddenly 50 years later is challenged to its core?

In other words, what can we know, and what function does Memory really have in all of this?

I was “re-minded” of Plato’s pithy dialog the “Meno” when I read this because that is one of the main Platonic dialogs that refers to the function of Memory with respect to Knowledge, or at least understanding. It also champions Mathematics as the one pure episteme (something that Taleb seems to have missed as well) because it can be coaxed from the most unlearned of minds, whereas other areas of so-called “knowledge” cannot, or at least according to Socrates.

The core of the argument is that Socrates shows by using sticks and sand that a completely uneducated slave boy can “re-member” geometry because it is part of the world of Ideals and thus part of the Soul, not the material world, despite its consequences within that world.

But, here’s the rub, did he jump or was he pushed?

In other words, did Socrates inadvertently teach him, or did he re-member? It is a serious dilemma within psychology (originally was really the study of the Soul, psyche) and in situations of persuasive manipulation of one’s memory. We were having this discussion this past Holiday when I was visiting my family, and my uncle a Neurologist, said this is a serious issue to contend with in Neurology. What really do we remember, or what do we THINK we remember?

That was the crux of Barnes’s novel as well, and it can be a devastating event to have found out something that we believed to be true, was what we THOUGHT was true, but did not remember it, because we never knew the Truth in the first place.

In Greek, Truth is often associated as a-lethia, or the un-forgetting of things. It is no surprise then, that often in life, when confronted with a Truth that we did not know, and had believed otherwise, many chose to go back to the riverbank of the Lethe and imbibe its waters.