I have asked my fiction students to memorize a paragraph of prose of their own choosing. This is not the first time I have done this. In the past, students have executed the task gracefully, if nervously. One student amazed me by committing to memory several pages from the opening of Sometimes a Great Notion. Others have been considerably less ambitious, but all have appeared to be proud of themselves.

This time, however, I have been questioning myself. What is the point of memorizing something, anything? I’m not sure. I am writing this to find out.

My 7^th grade English teacher, Mrs. Mahoney, believed in making students memorize. She had been an actress in her youth and had a flair for performing (she loved telling us about a time she stayed on stage and continued performing, despite an attack of appendicitis). She had us memorize Portia’s Quality of Mercy speech from The Merchant of Venice, and all the prepositions, five at a time, until we could recite the entire list. It must have been around that time that I memorized “The Owl and the Pussycat,” not for an assignment, simply because I loved the poem and had read it enough times that it stayed in my brain. A poem of my own, written in 6^th grade, got lodged in there too. “Why do we teach our children/ To love all, even foe/ When all the world around them/ Is filled with hate and woe…” It goes on in that vein, too embarrassing to quote more. In high school French we memorized “The Grasshopper and The Ant,” in French, of course. “La cigale ayant chante toute l’ete…” (Forgive French misspellings.) Some of that, I confess, has fallen away, but the opening to The Canterbury Tales I learned in college has remained.

I never recite these things seriously these days. Occasionally I’ll speak a few lines in jest, italicizing them with my voice, understanding no one wants to hear the whole thing. I get far enough to reassure myself it’s still intact, then I leave off, laughing, as if to say: how ridiculous.

There is plenty of other stuff stuck in my brain, too, stuff that I had no say in putting there. I’m thinking about the ads acquired through osmosis, for toothpaste, gum, Alka Seltzer. You wonder where the yellow went, when you brush your teeth with Pepsident… Pop, pop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is…Double your pleasure, double your fun, with double good, Doublemint, Doublemint Gum. These ditties only rise to the surface occasionally, like the lyrics of less-heard Beatles’ songs, affirming membership in a certain generation. Corporate crap, I think, on the one hand, but I don’t really wish these jingles away. They coexist quite peacefully with their high-brow neighbors.

I often wish, when I am teaching, that in those critical impressionable years when I could have memorized anything, that what I memorized would be more useful to me now, so that in class I could recite a line or two relevant to the topic at hand. (Professors of poetry seem more adept at this than professors of fiction.) The Quality of Mercy speech, lovely though it is, and the prepositions, essential though they are, are usually beside the point. Still, I am grateful to Mrs. Mahoney. She loved words and the cadences of language. She wanted us to hear language spoken aloud. My parents, when they read to us as children, wanted the same thing: savor these words, these rhythms, the music spoken language can make. And even when my sisters and I would devilishly recite in unison the words of certain ads—pop, pop, fizz, fizz—we were relishing the sounds of those words, the compulsive attraction of their beat. We were discovering the relationship between spoken word and song. We were delighting in language.

Okay, I’ve answered my question. What I hope to impart to my students with this assignment is a love of language, off the page and in the mouth.

Photo credit: thekeithhall via Visual Hunt / CC BY

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