Several weeks ago at our local library’s book sale, I picked
up an audio book by Umberto Ecco called The
Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.
Normally, Ecco’s books are way over my head and I usually make it
through about the first chapter, then admit defeat. As it turns out, the premise of the novel is
quite fascinating. It is about a man who
had been an antique book dealer that wakes up from a coma. His eidetic memory is totally in place. That is he can remember virtually everything
that he has ever read and every map or picture he has ever seen. So he can quote lines from Shakespeare, tell
you where all of the best restaurants in Paris are or tell you about Napoleon’s
battle at Waterloo, but he can not remember anything that he has personally
experienced. He does not know his own
name or recognize himself or family members in a picture. He can not even tell you what a hamburger
tastes like or what it feels like for something to be hot (like a cup of
coffee) because those are all things that you learn through experience. In
other words, his personal life is a total blank for him.
The remainder of the book concerns the protagonist’s trying
to get back the memories of his life. To
do this, he returns to the house that his parents owned when he was a child (his
parents are dead), and looks through the attic at all of boxes of books and
magazine he read as a boy, toys that he played with and notebooks that he kept
from school trying to recreate his life. The main concept of the book is that you are your experiences and it is your
experiences that have created you,
so that without them, you would have no identity.
The more I thought about it, the more the idea fascinated
me. It is not that the idea is a new
one, but that thinking of one’s self as a blank slate on which experiences are
imprinted is a visual image that makes the concept vivid. I thought that it would be an interesting
exercise for anyone to sit down and try to list those things that contributed
to creating who they are. I don’t mean
just a list, but a list in which you tried to grasp just what that might have
contributed to your personality. Obviously, the list is potentially infinite,
but I thought it would be fun to try half a dozen things that stuck out. In the book, Ecco’s list was largely limited
to printed materials, so in mine I’ve leaned rather heavily in that direction.
So here goes.
1. Being raised Roman
Catholic. I grew up at a time when
the Catholic Mass was still in Latin, the priest faced away from the people and
kids attended weekly Catechism classes to memorize the correct answers to
religious questions. What that taught me
was the need for structure: hierarchy, ritual, and following rules. The Latin
Mass kept mystery in religion, so that while everything had an answer it wasn’t
always one we could rationally understand.
The Latin hymns gave me an introductory feel for what another language
was like. I learned that guilt is a
strong motivator and was endowed with a belief that at some level, everything
fits together and makes sense, that everything is connected.
2. The Little Golden
Books. From as early as I can
remember, Mom read to us from books and for the most part it was from The
Little Golden Books that were prevalent in the 50’s. On one level, it endowed me with an
appreciation of reading. Being read to
by Mom made reading a positive personal experience. It taught me before going to school what
books and words were all about, that they could open up interesting personal
experiences and that it was something my parents valued. On another level, it taught ethics. All of the children’s books of those times
were morality driven. For example, Peter Rabbit got into trouble because he did
not listen to his mother and ended up paying for it. The
Little Red Hen – a classic – taught the Protestant work ethic, that hard
work pays off and if you don’t work, you don’t deserve to eat.
3. Sharing a Room.
My bed when I was first born was a dresser drawer and for as far back as I can
remember, I shared a room with my brother Steve. No one in our family had their
own room and kids who did were rich and privileged. Sharing your room literally meant that you
had to learn to share - whether it was a bed, a closet or your possessions. By
the same token, it also meant that you really had no space and that if you
wanted time to yourself, you had to seek it outside of the house. I don’t doubt that it really created a real
need for privacy in me. On the other hand, sharing a room was just normal –what
everyone did.
4. Moving. Less
obviously, moving every year or two and changing schools also seemed
normal. It never really occurred to me
until I was almost an adult that everyone did not move as we did. It taught me that instability is a fact of
life. Since my childhood was mostly in the fifties, it also reinforced the
patriarchal values of society: the family follows the father wherever his work
leads him and that the wife’s duties are to accompany him, raise the children,
and be the primary caretaker. I also
learned that friendship is a tenuous thing that rarely comes and always goes.
5. Compton’s Pictured
Encyclopedia. My parents had always
had an old bargain basement set of encyclopedias with tiny print, big words and
no pictures. At some point during my childhood, they bought a brand new set of
Encyclopedias. The exiting thing about
them was the colored pictures. The pictures were grouped together by topic and
my favorites were about animals. I would
sit down for hours looking at the pictures of all of the various breeds of dogs
or diagrams of the body and memorizing what they looked like and the facts
about them. It created a life long curiosity and interest in the biological
sciences and fascination about how the natural world works. I learned how to
look for information. Ironically, like the catechism, it reinforced belief in
the opinion of authority.
6. Great Books of the
Western World. The summer after ninth grade, I found a post card about a
set of books that contained many of the classic books from Homer to Freud and, being
interested in evolution, was excited that it contained Darwin’s Origin of Species. I mailed in the card for more information and a salesman showed up
at the door. I was embarrassed, but my parents, who could barely afford rent,
laid out hundreds of dollars for the books for me. I learned how much my parents value both my education and me by
their willingness to sacrifice. Driven by Catholic guilt, whenever it was time
for a book report or project I drew from those books, which gave me a nodding acquaintance
with Dante, Chaucer and Plato that most kids my age did not have and forced me
to look at authors I would never have read otherwise. On another level, though, the Great Books
were the product of an extremely conservative view of liberal arts education,
steeped in the concept of a western cannon that completely ignored work not
written by white European or American males.
I think that is enough to make the point.
I have not finished reading
The Mysterious Flame, so I don’t yet know if Ecco’s protagonist
discovers enough about himself to add up to a whole human being. It is not easy
to step outside oneself or one’s view of oneself and try to look at the
accumulating list objectively. There are
many contradictory forces at work. Looking
at my list and comments I ask myself, what do these things add up to? How many of
my day to day actions are rooted in what I learned before I was old
enough to have a paper route (another values-forming experience that I could
add to the list)? I think it is a
humbling experience and one that definitely complications the notion of who we
think we are.
