Memories on paper

As I downsize in preparation for moving from a large house into a small condo, I find it absurdly difficult to throw out some of the oddest items. One example is a four-page document called Movies In Auditorium Schedule listing the movies shown in Memorial Auditorium at Ohio University during the fall semester in 1962 when I was a freshman there.

So why would this be so hard to part with? Because it triggers many memories of my freshman year when college life was so new, so exciting, so promising.

Mostly this is a list of movies that a student could see for a mere quarter, which even the most impoverished student could usually afford. That semester I saw The Brothers Karamazov, The World, the Flesh and the Devil, Butterfield 8, The Magnificent Seven, North by Northwest, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Absent Minded Professor, Gone with the Wind, Bell, Book and Candle and other movies.

Yet the auditorium was used for more than just movies, and these other events are listed too. Bob Newhart appeared on Sept. 29, just a couple of weeks after the semester had begun. I had heard most of his routines on records, but they were so much more enjoyable in person. Afterward I happened to be among a small group of people gathered around Newhart in a little room behind the stage, where he signed autographs. I can recall looking around for some scrap of litter I might ask him to sign, then realizing that just being in a room with Newhart and listening to him speak within touching distance was reward enough.

Judith Anderson appeared in a production of Medea in October, and the opera Marriage of Figaro was performed in English in mid-November. I was there for both events, as I was for the Mock United Nations held later that semester.

Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor
in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Did I need this nearly 60-year-old schedule to remember those good times? In some cases, yes. I had forgotten that Newhart had appeared that early in my freshman year and that Butterfield 8 and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof were part of a series of Elizabeth Taylor movies. The list somehow helps package fragments of memory into a whole.

Joshua Foer discusses this sort of thing in his book Moonwalking with Einstein, reviewed here the other day. He makes a distinction between internal memory and external memory. The first is what we actually remember. I don't need any piece of paper to remember seeing that Bob Newhart performance. I often recall being there and hearing his routines and then seeing him backstage. External memory is those four sheets of paper, something I've kept for all these decades so I wouldn't have to remember every detail.

"The externalization of memory not only changed how people think; it also led to a profound shift in the very notion of what it means to be intelligent," Foer writes. "Internal memory became devalued. Erudition evolved from possessing information internally to knowing how and where to find it in the labyrinthine world of external memory." When we have something written on a piece of paper, even if it's a book we have never read, we somehow think we remember it. It's right there when we need it, just like an actual memory.

When we die our internal memories die with us. External memories stay behind, at least until somebody else throws them away. Perhaps the reason we find it so difficult to dispose of such things as that MIA schedule is that they somehow expand our hope of immortality. Perhaps that small bit of external memory will somehow survive longer than we do.

But now I may be able to put that old schedule in the recycling bag. The essential details of the external memory have been placed more securely into this blog.