10.xii.10

I remember first coming across Paul Scott’s ‘Raj Quartet’ in New City or Sneden’s landing back in the days when Mike Wallace was still a ferocious reporter and Burgess Meredith a semi-reired nice-guy actor. Everyone spoke well of Scott and – as I was an avid reader on matters Indian, from Louis Bromfield to Somerset Maugham, from the miraculously funny G. S. Desani to Narayan and Chaudhuri, not excluding Tagore of E.F. Forster – I too read him, and with pleasure.

More recently I watched the 14 episodes of Granada’s ‘Jewel in the Crown’, an account of the love-hatred relationship between the British and the Indians. Intermixed with newsreel footage from Movietone, it is focused on that very difficult task, understanding. To know a country, you have to understand it; the failure to do so (‘Only connect’, wrote Morgan Forster) cost European nations their colonies throughout the world. The films, which contain some marvelous character-parts by Eric Porter and Peggy Ashcroft, were an anatomy of that misunderstanding: seductive in their portrayal of a three-hundred-year-old cohabitation, rueful in the depiction of the disintegration of the India that had been

But what weighed principally in my mind was the role of memory in retaining both love and insult. It is something ingrained in all of us. A wife leaves citing three instances of brutality or disregard; every detail she can go through, and does, in detail. Ask her about the years of marital hapiness and its very every-dayness she cannot really recall. Grudges are lodged ,in the safety-box of the mind; the good is amorphous in its benevolence..

In nothing is this as true as in the relationship between colonizer and colonized.

HISTORICAL MEMORY

Good readers interested in history will be aware of the value of historical memory. That is, memories of the past with which there is a direct connection to the present, such as what your grandparents might tell you about what life was like when they were young. Without these testimonies the past fades until it is revived in what we call 'history'. Sometime, perhaps thirty years ago, the Times of London (then still a distinguished newspaper) asked its readers to submit authentic stories which they had heard, live, in their own lives. The idea behind the query was to find the person with the oldest historical memory, and as I recall, it was won by a grizzled Devonshire gentleman who had in his youth been dandled by his great-grandfather and told tales how his grandfather had served as a cabin-boy at Trafalgar (1805).

I was beaten out by a few years, for my historical memory goes back only to the Napoleonic kingdoms of Italy. My great-aunt Elisabetta Publicola-Santacroce was, on the only time I saw her in Rome after the war, a formidable old lady who lived in an ancient and spacious apartment just behind the Pantheon, on the Pozzo delle Cornacchie (Crow's Well). She stomped about with a heavy wooden tripod as support and told me tales of how enamored of Napoleon's French officers her grandmother had been in her youth, how 'liberating' they had been, how colorful, how unstuffy. Stendhal, who was then French consul in the Roman port of Civitavecchia, in his correspondence, confirms meeting members of that great-great-great-grandmother's stories.

None of which may be of great interest to others, but confirms the advice I give all young people: while you've got them, ask as many questions as you can from your Elders, for once they're gone, you are adrift in the history of others.

ON THE USE AND ABUSE OF MEMORY

In its issue of November 20, the TLS carries a review of Delete by Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, that raises some very interesting questions about information. It appears that in 2003, researchers at Berkeley sought to estimate how much 'information' had been produced in the previous year. They came up with the figure of five exabytes, which equals 37,000 Libraries of Congress. Delete as you will, that information will continue to live -- for which much gratitude from those whose computers are stolen, fritzed, or screwed up by the excesses of Microsoft. If nothing is lost, you can be sure the FBI and dear old Homeland Security has a copy. Somewhere. Of your rages and kinks and curiosities. It is strongly suggested that you do not look up the ingredients of bombs or how to effect a transfer of money between Akron and Aden.

The author's view -- and I have not yet read the book -- is that we have forgotten the importance of forgetting. Which means that almost anyone can access whatever you have not forgotten, or forgotten thoroughly enough. If you wrote that scurrilous, angry letter to your boss telling him you know how much he pads his expenses, with whom he is currently dallying, and by what schemes he plans to conceal his insider trading, then thought better of it and deleted it, it's still out there somewhere. Has it ever occured to you not to do something because you knew it would come out and be used against you? Women who visit gynecologists always wear clean knickers; we who vent -- unless we are old enough not to care any more what anyone thinks -- might prefer for it not to be known that we had once been fired for a grammatical incorretion. Quelle honnte!

The author's second fear is that too much memory us a dead weight, weighing against change and action. There are and have been people who remember absolutely everything; there is no doubt they wish they didn't. Would you wish to remember the smell of a Mexican oyster that turned out to be bad, or how much toothpaste was left in the tube on May 13th, 1946? The Mayer-Schoenberger view is that we must learn to forget; that we should set 'term-limits' on the digital 'information' we create.

This second problem is the one I find disturbing. Whether or not we will eventully use given memory (photograph, text, etc.) is impossible to predict. As the reviewer says, 'the value of what we keep changes depending in part on what we lose' and 'what we consciously chose to delete may serve to distort the past as what we chose not to delete may distort the future.' I once asked a dear friend how it was that I could not remember much of what I had written or published, and often perforce had to read it all over again. His answer was straightforward: I had forgotten it because I had used it. Having no further direct use for it, off it went.

I think I prefer the sheer happenstance of life: those letters from people you may have known briefly fifty or sixty years ago who see your name somewhere and begin, invariably, with 'You probably won't remember me, but. . .' That 'but' counts.