Since I was a little boy I remember that my mother would say to me when I felt sad, “Sursum corda”. It is from the Roman Catholic Mass and it means “lift up your heart”. So I know that corda is simply the Latin version of Greek for heart. We have cardiologists, etc.
Today in my Twitter/X feed I noticed a quote (ever so slightly prettified) by Uruguayan writer and poet Eduardo Galeano:
Recordar – del latín recordis – volver a pasar por el corazón.
To remember in Spanish the verb is recordar and a memory is a recuerdo. So Galeano’s quote is that a memory is something that passes by our heart again.
The quote had me thinking about my extensive library of about 3500 books (when we moved from Kerrisdale to Kits I threw away or gave away about 3000 more). With few exceptions I have read them all and that does not include the books I took out of the public library.
To me this means that inside me (my memory) I have a stack of books, a mental library. When I look at some of them I draw a blank. And then there are some like in the scans here of three books where I remember the first paragraph.
It would seem that our brain is a repository of books, memories, experiences and they all add up to make the person we are at any moment of the day. And that process only dies with our eventual oblivion.
From William Gibson’s Neuromancer: The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.
From Jane Rule’s Taking My Life: Writing an autobiography may be a positive way of taking my own life.
From Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.