The Anatomy of Memory

the long version

In The Anatomy of Memory James McConkey has assembled a rich selection of writings that illuminate the nature of memory and the varied roles it plays in our lives. Ranging from the scientific to the humanistic - from "hardwiring" and the complex functions of the brain, to the value of memory in human lifeThe Anatomy of Memory brings us insights from some of the most revered writers and thinkers of the past and present. We read of St. Augustine's struggle in Confessions to comprehend his memory; of Jung's theory of the collective unconscious; of Lewis Thomas's understanding in The Lives of the Cell, of memory at its most basic level, that of the cell. McConkey includes the poetry of Marianne Moore and William Butler Yeats; and excerpts from works as diverse as James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son, Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory, and Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk. Indeed, each of these writers has turned to memory to make sense of his or her own life, to understand the phenomenal world, and to discover the balance only memory can provide. Not least important are McConkey's own extensive introductions to every piece in the book - gems of insight formed by a lifetime of reflection on writers such as Anton Chekhov, E. B. White, Marcel Proust, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, Maya Angelou, William James, Norman Maclean, Eudora Welty, and many others.