No Wonder I Sweat So Much

We makes notes in, or about, our books. We refer back to them when we need to. We copy passages and insert them into essays, speech texts, teleprompters and blogs. We rarely, if ever, rely on memory for a text because we might miss a word.

But it was not always so. In the thirteenth century, students poured over authoritative texts and committed whole passages to memory, making their minds living libraries they could consult at will in an age when books were rare and exceedingly expensive. So much effort went into this memorization that they convinced themselves of some curious beneficial side effects to memorization:

They even believed that memorizing a text was physically beneficial, and cited as an authority the second-century Roman doctor Antyllus, who had written that those who have never learned verses by heart and must instead resort to reading them in books sometimes have great pains in eliminating, through abundant perspiration, the noxious fluids that those with a keen memory of texts eliminate merely through breathing.

--pages 60-61.

In the following pages, Manguel quotes an imaginary dialogue created by Petrarch in the 14th century between himself and Augustine on this subject. After Petrarch complains that the good books he reads are helpful while he's reading them, but "as soon as the book leaves my hands, all my feeling for it vanishes," Augustine proposes a solution:

Augustine: This manner of reading is now quite common; there's such a mob of lettered men. . . . But if you'd jot down a few notes in their proper place, you'd easily be able to enjoy the fruit of your reading.

[Petrarch]: What kind of notes do you mean?

Augustine: Whenever you read a book and come across any wonderful phrases which you feel stir or delight your soul, don't merely trust the power of your own intelligence, but force yourself to learn them by heart and make them familiar by meditating on them, so that whenever an urgent case of affliction arises, you'll have the remedy ready as if it were written in your mind. When you come to any passagtes that seem to you useful, make a firm mark against them, which may serve as lime in your memory, less otherwise they might fly away.

--page 63.

Or you could just type them into your blog!