The persistence of memory - by Ashley Zhang

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In his 1942 short story "Funes, the Memorious," Jorge Luis Borges writes of a boy cursed with perfect memory. Where ordinary people would see three glasses of wine, Funes saw “all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine. He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho." His mind teemed with “nothing but details, almost contiguous details,” too crowded for rest. At night, he would lie in bed, tormented by his knowledge of “every crevice and every molding of the various houses which surrounded him.” His memory was like a “garbage disposal,” overflowing with images and sensations and dreams that he could neither sort through nor make sense of. “To think,” Borges writes, “is to forget a difference, to

René Magritte. La Mémoire. 1948 In his 1942 short story "Funes, the Memorious," Jorge Luis Borges writes of a boy cursed with perfect memory. Where ordinary people would see three glasses of wine, Funes saw “all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine. He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho."…

The persistence of memory - by Ashley Zhang

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