When I was five, I memorized the presidents front-to-back for twenty bucks. I can still regurgitate the list before grinding to a halt at the presidents elected since: “Obama—Trump—Biden.” I found it harder to remember as I grew up, even as remembering important parts of the “Great Books” felt extremely urgent. Maria Montessori’s Absorbent Mind documents this difference well: the child’s mind is a sponge, but the adult’s has long since been saturated. Annie Dillard gave me almost existential angst about this difficulty with remembering: “Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.” Not a great R.O.I. for a liberal arts education.

So I wrote. I kept a list of books I’d read, a “commonplace” journal, rules for writing, blurbs of books that metastasized into full-length reviews, poetry memorized and to memorize, and more I’m embarrassed to share. I eventually learned (read: recollected) the law of diminishing returns and scaled back, picking just a few things to write down to remember. Yet writing to remember at all is dangerous, as we’ve known since Plato’s Phaedrus. Writing may fill my safe with more than ashes, but that which is written will never get into my bones as that list of presidents did. I only remember phone numbers from before I had a contact list.

I’ve thus also tried to remember by purposely not writing “important” things down and instead fixing them in my memory. Yet my memory refuses to function as one from a pre-literate Homeric age. It’s ruthless and utilitarian; it cannot be tricked about what’s important. It keeps what I need ready-to-hand and stuffs the rest away in dusty drawers whose contents I know not.

Strangely, though, my subconscious seems to know those contents well. Two weeks ago, I found myself struggling to remember some pointless fact—the name of a French heiress. I gave up after twenty minutes, but it later popped into my awareness: “Bettencourt.” My mind had been sifting through its own drawers without my knowledge, perhaps just waiting to see whether I would google the damn thing.

There’s an important difference between this kind of forgotten item—something you can remember, given time or a prompt (e.g., bilingual people can “pick up” a “forgotten” language very quickly)—and those parts of the mind that never reveal themselves. Montessori’s book suggests this second category. In the womb, the child forms her physical organs. But her “spiritual embryo” begins at birth when she forms psychic organs like perception, language, and conscious memory by interacting with the environment.

I doubt my two-year-old daughter will remember much from forming these psychic organs. She won’t remember my chasing her and playing “chag” or “hi-seek.” But I hope these unremembered joys will form her nonetheless into someone who loves her dad, fun, and mischief. Saint Ignatius suggests they might: “Give me the child for his first seven years, and I will give you the man.” It’s bewildering that we could forget such essential foundations of who we become—who remembers much from early childhood? But it’s compelling, too.

When I think about great books I read in college—The Intellectual Life, After Virtue, and Beyond Good and Evil—so little remains. I remember not structure, propositions, or theses, but pathetic snippets like “spend two hours a day in the intellectual life,” “emotivism,” and “aphorisms.” You may think I didn’t read them closely. I thought so too until I checked the marginalia. What did I take away from my purported deep engagement with these texts through long hours of study, discussion, and lectures? No matter how hard I search—and even after giving my subconscious time to look—I find little more than these snippets. More would return if I reread these books or deciphered my marginalia. But life is short, and there’s more to learn.

I think I carry with me another kind of knowledge—something like the sum total of all habits of mind and character that lead me to encounter the world in particular ways. Such intangibles are often denigrated as “soft skills.” These things cannot be googled or stowed for later reference. They are themselves the scaffolding of the mind, invisible underneath other drawers and papers but supporting them all. They are the most important parts of what I’ve learned: the unseen, the forgotten. Or so I tell myself as I forget almost all that I learn—except the last names of the first forty-three presidents.

This essay appeared in the Assumption 2024 issue of The Lamp.