A Primer for Forgetting. Lewis Hyde

up. He understood. It was as if for all those years there had been ice melting invisibly from below and then, of a sudden, the ice was gone.

      Hsiang-yen composed a poem that opens with the line “One tock! and I have forgotten all I knew.”

      TRIBAL SCARS: THE SPELLER. There is a touching moment in a French movie about little children going to school when we see a young boy writing the number 7 on a blackboard: he draws the horizontal top line and then pauses because he can’t remember if the downward slash comes from the right or the left side of the line. He gets it wrong, but of course what we’re seeing is how utterly arbitrary is the correct form, how conventional and local for an as-yet-unmarked mind.

      Just so with spelling, especially in English. Lem and Betty preserved a note that Lewis wrote when he was turning ten: BE SURE TO ATTEND LEWIS’S BIRTHDAY SELIBRACHON / ADDMISHON 15¢.

      Not that getting Lewis to read and teaching him to spell wounded him in any way that didn’t soon scar over, but that’s the point. Gentle as their touch might have been, these folks were shaping the boy. He still remembers the tune by which they got “bicycle” lodged in his mind, and the tip Lem offered for remembering the difference between “principal” and “principle” (the principal of the school should be your pal ). Nor did Lem defend the English language or lack in sympathy for its victim. One report reads that “poor Lewis got only 90 in spelling today because he knew that as between ‘bridge’ and ‘canal,’ one of them ends with an ‘e’ and the other doesn’t. But he got the ‘e’ on the wrong one. He tries without success to apply logic to spelling.”

      Lucky child to have that sympathetic father, but still, both man and boy are of the people who celebrate the principle that “bridge” ends in an e and whose children, if they are to thrive in this tribe, must leave home with that and all the other weird (wierd? weerd?) words on the weekly test incised on the mind like tattoos on the shaved head of a slave.

      “EASE AND CHEER.” Emanuel Lasker was one of the greatest chess players of all time, holding the world championship for a full twenty-eight years beginning in 1894. His classic Manual of Chess, published in 1927, ends with some “final reflections on education in chess” that include this remark: “Chess must not be memorized. . . . Memory is too valuable to be stocked with trifles. Of my fifty-seven years I have applied at least thirty to forgetting most of what I had learned or read, and since I succeeded in this I have acquired a certain ease and cheer which I should never again like to be without.”

      TRIBAL SCARS: THE HANDYMAN. In later years, one of Lewis’s friends, a successful Ivy League literary critic, passingly described him as being “handy,” a remark that irked him, for it felt as if it named a mere eccentricity, as if he knew Hittite grammar, say, or could recite the Pledge of Allegiance backward, whereas in the Hyde family being handy was a mark of the truly human (or at least of the truly human male). Visiting one of his daughters-in-law, Lem once asked if she had a hammer in the house. She did not know. In his later telling of the tale, it was clear that for Lem it was as if the woman did not know if her house had a bathroom.

      Lem himself was exceedingly handy, a fixer and a tinkerer. It wasn’t only that there were half a dozen patents under his name (No. 3001450: the improved rearview mirror; No. 3246507: the puff tonometer; and so on); it was that every house they lived in was an extension of the lab, full of cunning devices like the pulley that allowed the rooftop TV antenna to be rotated from a ground-floor closet or the wiring that put a phone in the tree house or the switches that let you control the garage light from any of three locations. The acquisition of a quarter-inch drill was literally something to write home about. In the mid-1950s, their first-ever TV set had to be accompanied by a complete set of replacement vacuum tubes so that Lem could be the in-house repairman. For decades, a Bendix washing machine traveled with the family from house to house with Lem constantly fixing it. July 1955: “I took apart most of the Bendix to fix the valve which got in trouble with rust. I know all there is to know, now, about mixing valves in Bendixes.” When the thing finally died, it became an organ donor, the solenoid salvaged from the carcass making an automatic garage-door opener for the village fire department; as the sirens wailed, the firehouse door would fly up to greet the arriving volunteers.

      When people asked Lewis how he became “handy,” he used to say that he really didn’t know beyond being curious and paying attention. But the Family Letters tell a different story. Lem buys Lewis a kit from which to make an electric motor. Lem pays Lewis three cents per shingle to help roof the garage. Lem’s quarter-inch drill is not for him alone: Lewis and his brother Lee are to run the wiring through the studs of the newly built guest room. Lewis builds model airplanes. He builds a birdhouse for Betty. He is given polarizing lenses, and Betty writes home, “Lewis spent a long time pasting various thicknesses of cellophane together so that he would have a varicolored butterfly when he put it between two polarizers. He will probably make a good scientist since he cares essentially nothing for the material things of this world and becomes absolutely engrossed in such projects. I never knew anyone so consistently oblivious to his surroundings.” Lem once bought Lewis a lens-grinding lap, “a tremendous piece of machinery which the two of us can scarcely lift,” Betty wrote. The gift arrived one Christmas Day, “and Lewis has spent almost all his time since then polishing agates that he found in Minnesota last summer. His hands turn blue from the abrasive, and he is perfectly blissful.”

      TRIBAL SCARS: THE SMARTY. Like an invisible electric fence by which a dog can be kept to its proper yard, in Lewis’s childhood a surround of offhand remarks about intelligence (“not stupid I keep saying to myself”) marked the line between the Dummies and the Smarties of this world. The Family Letters bear some traces: a carpenter’s helper described as “a little lacking mentally”; a cousin’s daughter graduating from college with “honors in chemistry though not cum laude”; Lewis in the fourth grade testing at the sixth-grade level; brother Lee in the seventh testing at the tenth.

      The substance of these observations is not the point but rather that they were worthy of speech in the first place, that it mattered to mark the categories, to sort the population, hand out the uniforms, and begin the endless back-and-forth of wits and half-wits, show and shame, the copulatory friction of identity-by-difference that repeats itself again and again into the future, there being no final resting place once the weary game has begun, for the tenth grade is followed by the eleventh, eleventh by twelfth, twelfth by college, graduate school, a job, another job, the horizon of Smartville receding with every achieved approach. The only relief would be to quit the game entirely; ah, but that would mean self-expulsion from the very tribe that brought you into being, exile from the one homeland whose citizens can always be counted on to remember who you are.

      In the last week of freshman year at the state university, Lewis slept through the final exam in chemistry, and although the kindly professor allowed him to take the test late, he ended up with a D in the course. This was a case not of a sleeper dreaming that he has forgotten an exam but of dreams themselves allowing the sleeper to forget an exam in fact. Betty said she had hoped that after a successful first year he could transfer to an Ivy League school, but now it was hopeless. He’d crossed the line. As the sun rose, some subtle, resistant force had deposited the slumbering youth on the shores of Dumbville.

      Years later, when he was accepted as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, his hosts bragged to the incoming fellows that percentage-wise it was harder to get into the Institute than it was to get into the freshman class at Harvard. Back across the line! What an honor! And yet an honor, it turned out, that brought an unexpected grief, for when Lewis got the news, his first impulse was to pick up the phone and call home, to close the loop with the authors and original audience of this element of Who He Was. But it was too late. Lem and Betty were both ten years dead.

      FEED ON THE PRESENT. Larry Rosenberg, a dharma teacher from the Insight Meditation Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, tells of the time he was in New York City with a free afternoon and his wife suggested that they visit the Tenement Museum, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Untouched for over fifty years, the museum’s apartments present preserved examples of the housing offered to immigrant families in the early twentieth century. Rosenberg himself had been born and raised in a similar building in the same neighborhood and found