Episode 244: Thanks for the Memories? (Borges' "Funes the Memorious)

David and Tamler return to Borges land to get lost in the infinite, this time with his legendary and tragic character Funes the memorious. What would it be like to have perfect memory, to have full access to every perceived detail no matter how trivial? Would life be infinitely richer, with present experience and memory merging into a perfect Heraclitan flow? Or is William James correct to say that one condition of remembering is to forget, and that “if we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.”?

Plus, we’re sorry, but after 10 years (!) we thought we had the right to get a little self-indulgent and naval-gazey. We do a bit of reminiscing (“though we have no right to speak that sacred verb..”) in the first segment about how the podcast has changed since 2012, and the impact it has made on our lives. Thanks for the memories!

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Links:

• Funes the Memorious - Wikipedia
• Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Andrew Hurley) [amazon.com affiliate link] — This volume contains the translation we used.
• A Case of Unusual Autobiographical Remembering