The Book Of Memory by Mark Rowlands: Want to live forever? This is the only way to be immortal

Would you like to live forever? It sounds utterly exhausting – and so I’ll pass, thank you, Professor Rowlands. Yet to some hopeful readers the subtitle of this short book on memory – ‘Or, How To Live Forever’ – will be very seductive. I’m not sure how a professor of philosophy can possess the recipe for the Elixir of Life – even if he’s as appealingly witty as this one. You couldn’t wish for a more pleasant companion to lead you on a merry dance around the idea of memory.

The future is inevitably full of holes, but the past is a closely woven carpet we can rest and rely on when the going gets tough. Or is it? We think we know what has happened to us, but often forget the detail: ‘It is memory,’ says Rowlands, ‘that makes you who you are.’ But that ‘who’ could be a teller of porkies. The angler who exaggerates the size of the one that got away reveals himself to be a fibber or somebody suffering from genuine memory loss.

The fishy ‘memory’ cannot be trusted. Rowlands points out that ‘we are not what we thought we are… The gap between us and fictional characters is not the vast chasm we have thought.’ Which of us can truly say we have never embellished an anecdote to show ourselves more witty, perceptive or brave than in fact we were? You don’t have to be a fantasist to rejig memories – even if unconsciously – and recreate yourself as hero or heroine of your own fiction.

Rowlands’ style is an enjoyable but odd mixture of the playfully personal and the obtusely academic. It doesn’t take long before you are sucked into his linguistic games, so that by page 17 you read ‘This has all been a little strange so far’ and either smile and say, ‘You’re not wrong, dude’ or frown with irritation. Sentences such as ‘To remember is to imagine and to imagine is to remember’ can sound philosophically profound, until you think hard and suspect it just might be professorial piffle.

Yet if we think of ourselves as stories – the stories of our own lives – then in a sense we become ‘written’ by what happened to us in our past. Those experiences are imprinted on our brains, embedded in the neurons, whether we know it or not. Just as our characters are formed by what we have experienced, so they might be warped by bad memories, even if those ‘memories’ are forgotten.

Rowlands comments, ‘Freud… travelled some distance in this direction, arguing that memories of malign episodes from one’s past could live on, even after they have seemingly disappeared, exerting a painful influence on a person’s psyche in the present.’ Of course, the opposite is true too: you might have a delightful, warm, fuzzy feeling when you hear some music or smell a particular fragrance, even if you can’t quite recall what pleasant memory is actually at work.

When Rowlands swings from the impenetrably academic (like Chapter 15, on neurons) to the casually autobiographical, The Book Of Memory takes off. Fortunately there’s far more of the latter than the former. The lighter his touch the more convincing his arguments. The more personal his examples, the more you can adapt them to your own story, your own memories.

A key anecdote, lead- ing us towards immortality, concerns a certain memory of his father. He recounts something he recalls from when he was two, realising that the vivid details of his father’s changing expressions back then cannot possibly be remembered. A child of that age is too young. What he thinks he remembers so clearly has to be based on his father’s endlessly repeated telling of that entertaining incident in his family history. ‘I remember what I think must have happened, and not necessarily what did actually happen.’ He is channelling the story that lived within his father’s memory, expressed in his father’s words. That’s a form of legacy.

Think about it. If (especially when a parent is dead) you try to remember their face when you were a child, what your memory actually summons up is their face when a lot older – when you were growing into an adult. When you remember an incident from your childhood, the memory you think is your very own is in fact your parent’s memory. In that way, their story is passed on to become your story. It raises the question of who ‘owns’ a memory?

This is where the consolation of the subtitle comes into play. He says, ‘Consolation or not, we all understand the idea of the departed living on in our memories. That is not what I am talking about.’ No, his subject is how the dear departed seem to ‘own’ our memories, and share them with us. It’s a strange concept to grasp, but when you do, remembering the beloved dead can suddenly feel like rejoicing rather than grief. Because you carry their memories within you – a key part of who you are.

Reading this, thinking of family stories just as Rowlands invokes his own, it occurred to me that since my late mother’s memories live on in me, then so does she. That story of me locking the back door when she was outside in the rain and I was three, that’s her story, not mine. But very memory of her makes it mine too – a beautiful process of sharing. Her star shines in my firmament forever.

Of course we can’t live forever. When I die the memories of my parents will continue within my children, but fade within my grandchildren – and so on. But Rowlands concludes, ‘our memories make us immortal even when we are no longer around to have them’. Well, I don’t think that’s true. But it’s a pleasant conceit.