Although this is a public domain website, it is also a ‘private anthology’, and wonderful will be the day when I have committed to memory more than a handful of its treasures. These notes and quotes concerning learning things by heart are the ground preparation for a new spate of memorizing.Â
And as I gear up, I hope you are inspired by Leigh Fermor’s idea of stocking up for a spell on a desert island, or other form of solitude, to do your own learning. Â See also Molly Peacock’s metaphor for memorizing lines. Â
At school some learning by heart was compulsory, though not irksome. But this intake was out-distanced many times, as it always is among people who need poetry, by a private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or a stretch of solitary. (I was at the age when one’s memory for poetry or for languages – indeed for anything – takes impressions like wax and, up to a point, lasts like marble.)  Â
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Source: Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts: On foot to Constantinople: from the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (London: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 84
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