Fresh Air Fiend Read Online Free PDF Page B

place of seven thousand thirteen he would say (for example)
Maximo Perez;
in place of seven thousand fourteen,
The Railroad;
other numbers were
Luis Melian Lafinur, Olimar, sulphur, the reins, the whale....
In place of five hundred he would say
nine.
    Â 
    Assigning an image to a word, Funes has reached the number twenty-four thousand. The narrator is at pains to point out that Funes is almost incapable of sustained thought or of generalizing. Funes can't understand why the word "dog" stands for so many shapes and forms of the animal, and more than that, "it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front)."
    In this oblique story of the memory palace of Ireneo Funes, Borges gives final expression to the clear link between memory and creation.
    Â 
    As a schoolboy I had no memory palace, but I did have a manageable sub-Funes system of converting anything I wished to remember into an image. My intelligence was emphatically pictorial, and in this I was buoyant, but I foundered whenever a subject became unreasonably abstract. I still regard the best sentences as those which throw up clear images, and the worst as opaque, intangible, unvisualizable—like this one!
    I performed well in school because rote capitulation was so important. Learning was memorizing: history was names and dates, geography was capitals and cash crops, English was reciting poems by heart ("The sun that bleak December day / Rose cheerless over hills of gray"). Biology was the simplest of all for me, not just a memory exercise but a new vocabulary: nictitating membranes, epithelial cells, osmosis, and the exotic-sounding islets of Langerhans (in the pancreas). Early in life, on the basis of my easy grasp of biological nomenclature and what I consider aesthetic reasons—all those euphonious names—I resolved to be a medical doctor. Even after I had abandoned the ambition, I went on telling people that it was my chosen profession—its being respectable and moneymaking, no one would question the choice.
    I survived school because I remembered everything: my memory saved me. It was an odd, undemanding, and unsatisfactory education, and I think, because so little writing was involved in it, that its oddness helped make me a writer. For one thing, I read whatever I liked—in a jumble, preferring adventures about fur trappers or castaways, ordeal stories that involved cannibalism
(Boon Island
by Kenneth Roberts comes to mind), and books considered smutty or outrageous in the 1950s:
Generation of Vipers, Tropic of Cancer, Lady Chatterley's Lover.
Because of the censorship and repression of the period, language itself—seeing certain forbidden words on a page—was a stimulant, a thrill. I avoided anything literary. I was not taught any formal approach to essay writing. I was forced to invent my own writing technique.
    This homemade reading list and my impressionistic method of writing did not serve me well at college. I was criticized for not being rigorous or trenchant. "Who says?" was a frequent comment by my teachers in the margins of my essays. I was offering personal opinions, not literary judgments. This did not worry me. My academic aim was never to excel but only to get it over with and move on. I was impatient to graduate: my reading had given me a taste, not for more reading or writing, but for seeing the wider, and wilder, world. I had felt small and isolated living in the place where I had grown up. I had read to find out about the world. I despaired of surviving being swallowed up by my hometown of Medford. I wanted to leave.
    There was another obstacle. In college I was curious and energetic, but there was a weariness in the novels I read, in life in general, a sense of doomsday approaching. The postwar dreariness had penetrated into the fifties and even overlapped the sixties, and in the vogue for the placeless novel or play or poem,