Douglas Murray
The Free Press, Feb. 19, 2023
“They can rob you, arrest you, disappear you, perhaps even kill you. Perhaps they can kill almost everyone, or at least make a very good try. But they cannot take a memory once it is embedded like this.”
Why commit anything—and poetry, of all things—to memory? Certain education specialists stress the synaptic advantages of learning lines by rote, especially when young, though that has been an unfashionable idea for some time. Fortunately, there is another reason, a better reason: a more human reason. Over the course of these short pieces I hope to be able to persuade you, the reader, that it is this reason above any other that counts. Poetry by heart is not just something you can swap out for sudoku.
Two foundational stories stick in my own mind. I will tell the second one next week, but I will start with an event that took place in Moscow in 1937.
That year’s annual Soviet writers’ congress took place in the worst time of the purges. At the major show trials in Moscow, people were confessing to things they could not possibly have done. Both the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge and the author Fitzroy Maclean, who observed these events, were credited with the line “I can believe everything except the facts.”
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