Notes & theories: Adrift on memory bliss - the pleasures (and perils)

`M em'ries may be beautiful, and yet..." Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards. Which is another way of saying that civilised man can be defined by his memories. It was said in the dark days when Soviet Socialist Realism was official policy in Russia, that art is memory, propaganda is prophecy. But this same precious memory function is also the source of our misery. The blind Argentinian fabulist, Jorge Luis Borges, thought the present moment is indefinite because at any given time the past is a present memory and the future is a present hope. This same conceit preoccupies many South American writers. Octavio Paz said: "Memory is not what we remember, but that which remembers us. Memory is a present that never stops."

If we were to live in this instant alone, sadness and disappointment would disappear from the menu of emotional options. It would all just be a matter of physical sensations. If we could achieve a state of unreflective primal innocence, then melancholy and anxiety might be banished. Without memory we would be in a state of brutish simplicity, influenced only by immediate physical responses. Warm, dry and well-fed? Fire those happy, happy neuro-transmitters! Cold, wet and hungry? Miserable! Yet personal and collective memories dog us with false hopes and real fears. We are made unhappy by comparing our present circumstances to better conditions, real or imagined, in the past.

This is the time of the year when the past 12 months are ritually exposed to scrutiny and tortured by analysis. Questions of narrative and cognition arise among punters, commentators, hucksters, shopping correspondents and critics who look backwards in (a quest for) understanding. The whole business of literary and art criticism, with their mechanisms of comparison and their historical schedules, depends on memory.

The Greeks were well aware of this: for them memory was the province of the gods. Mnemosyne's (from Mneme - remembrance) nine children were fathered by Zeus and became the Muses. Over the lintel of London University's Warburg Institute, dedicated to the study of the classical tradition, Mnemosyne's name is written in Greek. But memory is a far from simple construct. T S Eliot caught some of its delicious ambiguities in "Burnt Norton" when he wrote that "Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future/ And time future contained in time past."

In the ancient world, the growth of knowledge brought memory into play. It became a part of rhetoric and devices for training memory became known as mnemonics. Interestingly, it was soon discovered that an efficient method of memory training was for the orator to imagine a complex building with warrens of rooms. In every room the orator would place ideas and, when necessary to recover them, he would simply revisit the building, literally recollecting ideas as his imagination walked down corridors and into ante-chambers. This old scholastic tradition of a "memory palace" surfaced in English in a 1562 translation by William Fulwood, called The Castle of Memorie. Today, the architectural metaphors of memory survive in the technobabble of computer jargon.

But as well as poetic memory with its sorrows, there is technical memory with its dazzling achievements. When trained, the brain can achieve astonishing feats of recall.

While some of us struggle to remember four-digit PINs, the 17th- century English mathematician John Wallis could compute a 53-digit square root in his head. The novelist, Samuel Butler wanted to make a new edition of Shakespeare's sonnets and felt, while he was writing two other books at the same time, that he could not possibly do so unless he had every sonnet word-perfect. And John von Neumann, the game theoretician who coined the term "bit" for an element of computer memory, could memorise entire books verbatim.

Then there is the business of what Jean Delacour, a psycho- physiologist at the Universite de Paris, memorably called "cued retrieval of explicit memory, characterised by episodic content were the spatial component of the context is particularly important". This involves, in literature's most famous exercise in memory, some unsalted butter, an egg, vanilla essence, caster sugar, sifted flour and grated orange peel. This classic recipe for a madeleine, when taken with a tisane of lime blossom, inspired Marcel Proust to go in search of the "L'edifice du souvenir", the object of his vast novel of memory A la recherche du temps perdu. Proust said of his epiphany with tea and cake, "as soon as I recognised the taste ... immediately the old grey house on the street ... rose up like a stage set".

Again, it is striking how an architectural metaphor materialises to make a point about the structure of memory, although Proust believed that taste and smell actually last longer than buildings themselves. It is so beautiful, it ought to be read in French. But here's Scott-Moncrieff and Kilmartin's translation: