Abstract
[...]I recognize the maddening imperfections of memory: its unreliability, its failures, its deceptions, its panderings, its whispering seductions, its stealthy editing of experience for personal benefit-and its penchant for cruel taunts, for hurling self-condemnations at us without warning, for keeping us awake at night as we cling to any distraction to avoid an encounter with the rebuke of our own recollections. Here I was at Johns Hopkins, an institution that prided itself on being the model of the modern research university in the United States, an institution dedicated not to the placid ideal of cultural conservation but to inquiry, to the remorseless supplanting of traditional learning with ever more incisive and disruptive scientific knowledge, including the relentless rethinking and reinterpretation of the past. What is described here is a very intimate memory-world, the Lebenswelt of a couple, "our tribe of two," against whose union the peeping-Tom intrusions of "reality"-the nattering, cynical voice declaring "he isn't that handsome, she isn't that pretty"-seem irrelevant, since they are not expressed in the wordless language that, Gioia tells us, is learned by heart. (Why is it that we say that memorized things are learned by heart, rather than by head?) Families, too, accumulate such lore, mental scrapbooks of sayings, stories, adages, puns, snatches of TV shows and song lyrics and advertising jingles, forming a household patois, also learned by heart, also generally inaccessible to outsiders, sometimes even spouses-in-law.