How to Improve the Memory/Lesson 9
LESSON IX
PARAPHRASING AS AN AID TO
MEMORY
PARAPHRASING is one of the best means of strengthening the memory and building up the mental faculties because of the necessity of thoroughly understanding a subject before it can be paraphrased. It is essential that the thought contained in words should be fully discovered and laid bare before it can be reclothed in one's own language, and this entails on the paraphraser a lot of digging for the thought, a concentration of the thinking powers, and close attention to the matter to be paraphrased in order that all the essential points may be seen and reproduced. After the subject has been keenly analyzed, all the points or facts should be systematically arranged, all contrasts, appositions and series noted, and a complete framework constructed, and then it will be found that such a clear understanding will be possessed of the matter that is to be paraphrased that the words to convey the thoughts will flow freely. All that is necessary is to hold on to the idea, to keep the thought clearly before the mind, and the words to convey it will spontaneously appear. Paraphrasing makes a careful reader or observer, and, if you remember, stress has, in several of these lessons, been placed upon the prime necessity of paying attention to things in order that they may be impressed upon the mind; and in the second place, it trains the student to keep ever before him, while the mind is in operation, his object, thought, or theme, in order that he may reproduce from the chambers of memory all that he has stored there that pertains to the subject in hand. We will get down to practical work by paraphrasing some extracts from Ralph Waldo Emerson's oration, The American Scholar, delivered at Cambridge, Mass., August 31, 1887.
BOOKS
(1) The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind and uttered it again. It came into him, life; it went out from him, truth. It came to him, short-lived actions; it went out from him, immortal thoughts. It came to him, business; it went from him, poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It can stand and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.
The idea concerning the making of books is both romantic and grand. The first thinker looked out upon the world around him and beheld its many wonders. He saw the towering mountains, the deep vales, the broad plains; he heard the sighing of the winds, the rush of waters, and the peals of thunder; he beheld the majestic sun by day and the placid moon by night; the lightning, tearing its pathway through the firmament, thrilled his soul; the myriad of stars filled him with wonder; and Nature, with her many tongues, spoke to him her miraculous language. All these things he pondered upon; communed with them in silence; dreamed of them until they became a part of his being; set them in the order in which they most appealed to him and gave expression to them in his own way. He gazed upon the mountain, a vast mound of rock and earth, and its material aspect passing from his mental vision he beheld its spiritual form and wondered at the forces that created it; the voice of the wind, the sigh of the tree, the song of the bird, the light of the stars, all spoke to him in plaintive tones and caused him to open his heart to their several voices; the green of the grass, the bright colors of the flowers, the gorgeous arch of the bow set upon the face of heaven caused him to ponder as to the origin of their beauties. All these things were evidences of life, it is true, but they were without the power of continued existence until they had become a part of man, entered his mind, and been transferred into thought. The mountain, the dale, the plain, the river, the stars, were all facts, but as soon as an understanding of them entered the soul of man they became spirits of eternity through being converted into thoughts. The strength of the thought, its ability to live, its power to affect, depended absolutely upon the depth, force, and continuity of observation which was bestowed upon the original objects before their spiritual aspects were noted by man.
(2) Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone of transmuting life into truth. In proportion to the completeness of the distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the product be. But none is quite perfect. As no air pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.
In other words, the power of man to reproduce in the shape of thought what he beholds in the form of nature depends on the depth and power of his observation, on his ability to look into causes and find out what produces effects. The more he is able to do this, the greater his ability to reason, the more substantial and lasting will be his conclusions. Nothing in this life is absolutely correct; we are incapable of tracing a perfectly straight line or doing anything that might not be improved upon, consequently it is impossible for an author to produce a book that is free from error, or one that will last for all ages. Books, like all things pertaining to man, are best suited for the era in which they were written. It has been demonstrated that books of a past generation are no more suited to the people of the present period than are the clothes of our ancestors becoming to us. They were all right in their time, but are now out of date, and are only useful as chroniclers of the past.
(3) Yet here arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation—the act of thought—is transferred to the record. The poet chanting, was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled, the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it and makes an outcry if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.
Here we meet with a serious drawback, a blind worship of all that is ancient. Whenever a grand and noble thought is expressed in words, picture, or marble, we are apt to lose sight of the divinity of the utterance and look upon the poet, painter, or sculptor as being divine, and bow down to and worship the product, the created, instead of the thought, the creator. This is the grave mischief which arises from a blind clinging to the fact, a tying of ourselves to the productions of past ages instead of creating for ourselves. Whenever we look upon a book as being perfect, whenever we blindly cling to it and refuse to go further, that book is a menace to our mental liberty and becomes a hindrance instead of a help. Those who fasten themselves to such a book, see nothing of value anywhere but in that book, become bigots and surrender up their independence of thought. Colleges have been built upon books of which the thoughts contained therein were as dead as the men who gave utterance to them. Other books are written upon these books by book-readers and not by communers with Nature; and thus, instead of a voice speaking directly to us, we have nothing but echoes that repeat the thoughts of those who have spoken and passed away. In this manner many make a poor beginning through surrendering themselves to the doctrines or systems of others instead of laying hold of the everlasting principles of thought which live within the souls of men, the expressing of which denotes the individuality of the thinker. Men blindly accept the doctrines as expounded by Cicero, Locke, and Bacon, and lose sight of the fact that these very men whom they delight in quoting were at one time young men pouring over the productions of earlier ages. They were men, with the faults and weaknesses of men, and yet they are placed by many upon pedestals and worshiped almost as gods. Under such circumstances the productions of these men are injurious instead of beneficial.
(4) Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees.
Instead of an active soul, an original thinker, we have the eater of books, the devourer of other men's productions, the man who loves books because they are books and not for the matter they contain. Such men set books between themselves and Nature, make a barrier of them, as it were, preventing their gazing out into the world and seeing the beauties and wonders thereof. From this same source come the men who delight to twist and turn the writings of famous authors, the men who come forward with new readings and interpretations, the men who can tell you the life and history of books, the date of their first issue, the names of the publishers, the styles of binding, etc., but who never have an original thought to utter. It were better books had not come down to us than to exist merely to fetter our minds and dwarf our souls by destroying our individuality.
N. B.—It will repay the student to read carefully the entire address, The American Scholar, and to paraphrase a portion of it from time to time until the address has thus been thoroughly studied.