David Beresford
Another Country
There seems to be growing excitement in the world’s laboratories over the success scientists are having in repairing and even enhancing memory in rats and mice, in anticipation of replicating the feat on humans. One’s thoughts on reading such reports must be much the same as would have passed through the minds of many a besieged soldier on hearing the wail of distant bugles: will they get to me in time?
I am a person to whom the term “forgetful” has been applied with more than usual frequency. I forget faces, I forget names, appointments, birthdays … I’ve overlooked lunch appointments with indiscriminate, if otherwise shameful, frequency. I’ve saddened loved ones and I suspect many a friendship, which would have otherwise gladdened my life, has been … just lost in never-ending forgetfulness.
My perception of it as a weakness of character found expression in an early obsession with “to do” lists. I longed to remember, to organise my life. I was a Filofax pioneer, for example, purchasing my first of the breed from a small stationery shop on Haymarket that was, I believe, the only shop selling them in London at the time, years before they became fashionable. Packed with “to-do” lists, anniversaries and names, it was my first weapon in the fight-back against forgetfulness. It was the key to my life. It was my life it was all there, within that bulging leather-bound parcel. Only trouble, of course, was that I was always forgetting to look at it, forgetting it on the bus, forgetting it …
Then along came the electronic organiser, the personal digital assistant and the palm-top that coupled appointments with alarms, facilitated the prioritising of “to do” lists and, with the help of data-bases, enabled one to hurriedly make key-word searches to identify the faces glimpsed across the proverbially crowded room (“squint+photographer”, “horse+blonde” and so on).
Of course, the more sophisticated the memory aids became, the more time one spent exploiting them and the less time one had in which to do anything worth remembering. That was in addition to remembering to update input, remembering to put the machine in my pocket, remembering to switch the alarm on, remembering to replace the batteries …
Moore’s Law which, as I understand it, has it that the capacity of semi-conductors doubles every 18 months was nothing compared to Beresford’s Law about the Frightening Expansion of To Do Lists. In time my days seemed to be almost entirely taken up with the updating, rearrangement, redesign and reprinting of “to do” lists.
Realising that I faced a life crisis I took some time off to reconsider my tactical approach. Casting my mind back over my years of shameful forgetfulness I remembered an act of forgetfulness that was so bizarre that my mind boggled at the recollection of it.
I had decided at the time to write a book, one leg of which revolved to some extent around a real character who had committed suicide in New York. Happening across some information that raised a suspicion about the circumstances of his death I decided to take a week’s leave from my newspaper and fly to New York to confront a witness.
On my way I stopped off in London and met my eldest son then a university student on holiday. It struck me that I wouldn’t have much to do in New York and he had never been there. So I persuaded him to join me.
We had a wonderful few days exploring the Big Apple and it was only as we flew out of John F Kennedy that I realised I had forgotten the interview that had been the motive for the trip. The oversight was so inexplicable that I abandoned the entire book, in retrospect with little regret. It was almost as if my muse had dropped a quiet word in the ear of my subconscious, saying: “This one won’t fly.”
Digging back even further into my dusty memory banks, to the 1980s, I dredged up another, similar incident of forgetfulness. I had been approached, as a foreign correspondent, by a local journalist whom I did not know personally. He had presented me with a batch of “top secret” South African Defence Force documents. An eternally “hungry” newspaperman, I was puzzled, months later, to find them buried in a pile of forgotten papers in my office.
Putting them aside for my “immediate” attention I immediately forgot all about them again.
Various other sighting and baffling disappearances of the material took place until years later when I heard that the journalist who had presented them to me had been a government agent. The documents were seemingly a “plant” that my subconscious had dealt with by means of the mechanism we scornfully characterise as forgetfulness. Finally I was able to throw them into a rubbish bin.
Just as scientists are discovering the desirability of suicide in cells, as a more normal and desirable process than their endless proliferation into cancers, is there not something to be treasured in forgetfulness? Even overlooking family birthdays could be excused as a ploy to keep them forever young.
After all, what more reassuring way can we approach the great terror, of death, than to see it as an inexplicable fit of forgetfulness. A final relief from “to do” lists.