MARGINAL COMMENT
By tiAitoLls NICOLSON
IAM always astounded by the amount of knowledge which other people possess. I am not referring to those specialists who can discourse intelligently about the respective merits of the paeonic or the logaoedic rhythm, who can explain with ease the intricacies of Ypurinan syntax, or who, when observing a moth digging holes in a tweed coat, will immediately exclaim Tinea Pellionella. I am not distressed by these manifestations of superior concentration, since I have a deep affection for specialists. I admire men and women who can devote their lives to Pindar's prosody, to philology or lepidoptcra, and I have the happy disposition that enables me to listen entranced to experts talking shop. Nor, when I express my astonishment at the amount that other people know, am I referring to those men of massive mind, such as Aristotle and Sir John Ander- son, who have something to say about everything and everything about something. Aristotle, as Dante assured us many years ago, is the master of them that know ; it is indeed remarkable that, living as he did in an inquisitive but ill-equipped age, he should have been able, not merely to write excellently about the human soul, not merely to analyse the most subtle gradations of political sovereignty, but also to notice that the sea-perch was a hermaphrodite. Sir John Anderson again? although an extremely modest man, is able without effort to impart information regarding the incidence of the land tax in the Punjab, the location of tourmalines and the functions of the olfactory organs in cyclostomes. I am never disturbed, but always encouraged, by such examples either of the concentration or expansion of knowledge. I well know that I do not myself possess the patience of the specialist or the cerebral muscles of the Aristotles and Anderson. I regard these phenomena with comfort- able awe.
What causes me discomfort or self-reproach is the amount of available knowledge possessed by quite ordinary people like myself. After all, I have lived for many years in this varied and entrancing world, I have travelled much and met many types of human beings, and I have read many hundreds of books in many different languages. From time to time I also have specialised in different aspects of life or letters and have devoted hours of study to acquiring knowledge regarding one particular subject. Yet although I have accumulated and retained a useful little capital of impressions, I do not find that in ordinary conversation I am very good at producing figures, names or facts. This defect might be explicable if I were afflicted with an abnormally leaky memory ; but in general my memory is perfectly normal and at moments bright. Yet I have observed that, whereas I can remember with sufficient clarity the subject, style and tone of a book which I read a year ago, I am totally unable to recall its title or the names of the characters whom it presents. It is thus distressing and indeed humiliating for me to notice that other people, who are neither specialists nor men of massive mind, can quote the names and words of Jane Austen's minor personages or tell one with glib precision whether one has to change at Empoli or not. It all comes, I believe, from the chance that my memory is aural and not visual. Which explains why, although sociable, I am unable to recognise faces ; and why, although literate, I am unable to spell. But it does not explain why other ordinary people always know so much more about things than I do myself.
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The disadvantage of possessing an aural memory is not only that one cuts one's closest friends in the street, or is confused by assonances (thereby being apt to find some non-existent relation between Armoric and Amharic) but that it is only by an effort of Will that one recognises a distinction between 20,000 and 200,000. The advantage is that it endows one with certain fibres, filaments or antennae of perception which enable one to understand what other people are saying more rapidly than can those whose memories are visual. Moreover, while it enables one to assimilate foreign languages with superficial ease, it also assists one in recalling with comparative accuracy the course of any recent conversation. Had I possessed a visual memory, I might have become a classical scholar ; as I possess an aural memory only, I have been allowed to achieve no more than much delight from the classics. On the whole, I like to believe, the possessors of aural memories get much more fun out of life, whereas those gifted with visual memories are more suc- cessful. These consolations, which may be no more than subjective fallacies, do not however suffice to salve the wounds inflicted upon my self-esteem by the circumstance that, even in matters to which I have devoted much attention, other people are able to produce their information more rapidly, more confidently and more impres- sively than I can myself. It is irritating for me, having devoted much time to the examination of the Epirote question, to find that I say Konitsa when I mean Koritsa, or that, being a humble Byron student, I should have remained so long under the impression that it was Byron who wrote "Oh woman, in our hours of ease. . . . " Those of my friends who arc gifted with visual memories and who derive pleasure (as I do not) from imparting information, are shocked by such inaccuracies. The pain caused to them by my solecisms is, to do them justice, greater than the pleasure they derive from their own outstanding precision.
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I have observed, moreover, that those gifted and successful people who possess visual memories are less inclined than are those of the fluid aural brood to imagine that their knowledge, being accurate, can ever be out of date. They believe that a fact which was a fact in 1922 must still remain a fact in 1949. We auralists are reinforced by no such confidence. I am quite positive that such knowledge as I acquired of the Ottoman Empire in 1912 (and it was slight indeed) can bear no relation to the realities of the Turkey of today. I am fully conscious that the experience I gained between the wars of Greek politics and personalities is of no value at all in estimating the true causes of General Markos's removal. I am well aware that any impressions I may have derived of the German character before 1933 can bear but a remote relation to any deductions which would be made by those who have studied that complex problem since Hitler ruled. And I have a strong feeling that even an intimate experience of the working of the League of Nations can have only a relative value in estimating the functioning of United Nations or the remarkable experiment now being essayed at Strasbourg. Indeed the only merit that I can see in previous knowledge is that it does provide some background against which to assess subsequent changes. The auralist, who enjoys alterations, is quite alert at estimating differences ; the visualist, with his passion for the devouring but long since devoured fact, is all too apt to recognise only those vestigial similarities which accord with his preconceptions.
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These reflections are comforting and I earnestly hope that they are true as well. But they do not explain why other people are so positive about things whereas I am always so uncertain. It is not because I wholly disbelieve in facts, because I am a materialist or an atomist, because I see the universe in a state of constant flux, " rolling ever from creation to decay." On the contrary, I believe firmly in certain absolutes, while holding that circumstances, and therefore knowledge, arc in a constant state of mutability. Yet it would be agreeable if I could sometimes, at social gatherings, be as assured and as impressive as those who, although their per- ceptions may be rigid and thereby distorted, can produce from the filing cabinets of their minds whole dossiers of facts and figures with which to confute, confound and perhaps humiliate those wretched auralists who hesitate to assert with any confidence whether the population of Ankara is 12,72o or 122,720. It is bad for the soul to be too envious ; I try hard to keep my envy of these valuable conversationalists under control.
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