What have you memorized?

«Pensar, analizar, inventar no son actos anómalos; son la normal respiración de la inteligencia. Glorificar el ocasional cumplimiento de esta función, atesorar antigüos y ajenos pensamientos, y recordar con incredulo estupor lo que el doctor universalis pensó no es más que reconocer nuestra languidez o nuestra barbarie. Todo hombre debe ser capaz de todas las ideas y entiendo que en el porvenir lo será».

I've memorised the anatomy of some animals and can draw them from any angle.

Words are... slippery. I am visual, not verbal. I have not memorised any, although my grandfather used to be able to recite long tracts of poetry if asked. I still remember walking along the beach with him, trying to find the crunchiest shells to step on, as he recited the Inchcape Rock and the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I'm sure he knew others, but as we were by the seaside, we stuck to sea-themed poetry.

Into my heart an air that kills...

The plane scene from TDKR.

The rgveda

>.I am visual, not verbal.

This idea that some people are visual learners as opposed to anything else is nonsense. There's no basis for it and it becomes a self fulfilling prophesy once you've told yourself that you can't remember words. I have no doubt that at the moment you have trouble remembering certain things but it can be fixed if you cut the bullshit. Learn the method of loci and recognize that repetition is key. Memory is just like anything else in that if you want to be good at it you have to put in the work.

shut up, baby dick

>This is precisely the issue with the world today.
Not wanting to learn poems and monologues is precisely the issue with the world today? It's not the hunger in Africa, economic uncertainty, the global warming, American cultural and economic imperialism, the migrant crisis, the shrinking birth rate in most developed countries or the possibility of a nuclear war? You are an idiot. A complete fucking idiot. Judging by your writing style, knowing Byron and Shakespeare only made you sound somewhat pretentious. Wow, the guy got drunk and recited Shakespeare, that sure did help his countrymen. What a great statesman.
I have memorized poems. So what? If I don't find a job I'll starve, with or without Shakespeare's sonnets and all that nebulous bullshit you described. Memorization of poetry is what you might do after you've learned how to properly appreciate poetry, but today maybe 1% of world population reads any poetry at all. But, no, beggars should know some Shakespeare offhand and oh yes my farts do indeed smell real nice.

user, I couldn't even read until I was nine years old although reading lessons started when I was four, and if I was given a string of instructions aloud, I could only remember the first in the series. I had a friend in primary school who had to relay what the teacher had told us just minutes before because I inevitably got hopelessly after completing the first task.

If you showed me how to do something using a series of pictures, however, you bet I worked it out and remembered it straight away.

What is your mental disability called?

You can probably guess.

The ability to cite Scripture, to recite from memory large stretches of Homer, Virgil, Horace or Ovid, to cap on the instant a quotation from Shakespeare, Milton or Pope, generated the shared texture of echoes, of intellectual and emotive recognition and reciprocity, on which the language of British politics, law and letters was founded. Knowledge by heart of the Latin sources, of La Fontaine, of Racine, of the trumpet-calls in Victor Hugo, has given to the entire fabric of French public life its rhetorical stress. The classic reader, Chardin's lisant, locates the text he is reading inside a resonant manifold. Echo answers echo, analogy is precise and contiguous, correction and emendation carry the justification of accurately remembered precedent. The reader replies to the text out of the articulate density of his own store of reference and remembrance. It is an ancient, formidable suggestion that the Muses of memory and of invention are one.

The atrophy of memory is the commanding trait in mid and later twentieth-century education and culture. The great majority of us can no longer identify, let alone quote, even the central biblical or classical passages which not only are the underlying script of western literature (from Caxton to Robert Lowell, poetry in English has carried inside it the implicit echo of previous poetry), but have been the alphabet of our laws and public institutions. The most elementary allusions to Greek mythology, to the Old and the New Testament, to the classics, to ancient and to European history, have become hermetic. Short bits of text now lead precarious lives on great stilts of footnotes. The identification of fauna and flora, of the principal constellations, of the liturgical hours and seasons on which, as C. S. Lewis showed, the barest understanding of western poetry, drama and romance from Boccaccio to Tennyson intimately depends, is now specialized knowledge. We no longer learn by heart. The inner spaces are mute or jammed with raucous trivia.

This is probably the most pretentious post I've ever seen on Veeky Forums. Now I truly see the importance of memorization of poetry.

And yet he's 100% correct

Good post, friend. As much as our societies disincentivize it, we must endeavor to inscribe this economically 'useless' information upon our hearts.

>And yet he's 100% correct
Explain how without resorting to appeals to emotion couched in flowery language.

3.14159265358979323846

idk why i think i have autism

thats a lot of words used to very little

Hafizes are super impressive, the sheer dedication is awe inspring. I have meet two and they were extremely kindhearted and amazing malaysians.
Also, the "singing" of the Qur'an is not a unique trait. Whenever a muslim reads the Qur'an they should make their recitation beautiful, I don't even speak arabic and I do it.
Here is my favorite reciter: youtube.com/watch?v=mLJA5ImEYgA
The Qur'an can only be understood in arabic, all translations are lacking.

Muchos años después....

The Church, the classics, etc. amalgamated into a language of their own; a language common to all Europeans. We once understood each other in and through liturgy, philosophy, poetry. Now we all jabber, we speak our own language, our tongues are confused. We have no common ground to stand upon.

Think about how Plato incorporates mythological references in all of his work to help the reader understand. Imagine a world where statesmen could come together in this manner: one might quote a brief selection from Iliad, and the other, through his rigorous study of the Classics, would know exactly what he was referencing, which part, and the meaning of it. Perhaps they could get into a row over the significance of Antigone's sacrifice, and whether she acted appropriately or inappropriately, as a means of externalizing whatever matter they wished to discuss in order to take a more objective view of it. Now imagine two people with a high school-tier educational attainment, yelling at each other, debating the meaning of terms like 'liberty' and 'democracy', when they've never read a single book in common, when they do not share a religion, when they grew up hearing different folklore, different histories, and when either is apt to call the other a 'fucking nerd' for making even the slightest overture towards culture.

>waah people with different backgrounds make me uncomfortable!! :'(
pure emotion
I give you an F

Look, user, the problems within your list have been generated by individuals, by people as a whole. If we had individuals who were able to speak the same poetic language, with the compassion, the elegance, the conviction, or any other number of laudable aspects which certain works provide, those issues, in my opinion, would begin to dissolve; they are symptomatic of the intellectual/spiritual depravity of the world. The world is moving in a good direction overall across a great number of metrics. I believe that adding iotas of poetry within our daily consciousness would contribute positively to our day-to-day as well as our global issues.
More directly, the encouragement of the memorization of poetry would absolutely ameliorate American cultural imperialism, when the world would be memorizing Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Racine, Goethe.etc American cultural imperialism fills the void which could have been glutted by Weltliteratur.
Finally, I love how you complain about American economic imperialism, and then hoist the need of finding a job or else you would starve. Perhaps, if we began to appreciate our tradition, we could adulate Diogenes of Sinope, or St. Simon the Stylite or any number of ascetics and 'simple livers', and take from their lives inspiration.

You might be interested in: shakespearebehindbars.org/
Where prisoners put on productions of Shakespeare. What happens? When they are freed, those prisoners end up having drastically lower recidivism rates.

Art is not mere ornament.

Beautiful. Thank you.

A couple of Shakespeare's sonnets
Yeats's Lamentation of the Old Pensioner
Some Nietzsche
A nonsense rhyme from elementary school
Working on Keats's Ode to Autumn now

Some of Owen's poems and a bit of Shakespeare. Generally monologues but girls around here think being able to memorize a simple sonnet is super hot so I do it almost strictly to sound pretentious and well read. Hell, I could butcher a sonnet and these girls wouldn't be any the wiser since they don't read ever. It makes me feel all pretty on the inside.

Prologue from John's Gospel (plus a bit)
Genealogy from Matthew (plus a bit)
Lord's Prayer
numerous other NT vss
numerous Psalms
(first part of the) Creation account from Gen 1
in the original languages
and parts in miscellaneous other languages

Prayers from the Bible
Shakespeare's Sonnets

I used to have a decent number of hex digits (and therefore 4x as many bits) of pi memorized

Stopping by the woods in a snowy evening

Whose woods these are I think I know
his house is in the village though
he will not see me stopping here
to watch his woods fill up with snow

My little horse must think it queer
to stop without a farmhouse near
between the woods and frozen lake
the darkest evening of the year

He gives his harness bells a shake
to ask if there is some mistake
the only other sound’s the sweep
of easy wind and downy flake

The woods are lovely, dark and deep
but I have promises to keep
and miles to go before I sleep
and miles to go before I sleep

The Turkish Revelry
I recited it after surgery to distract myself until the pain meds started working.
youtube.com/watch?v=OiBnrGHeBOY

A bunch of stanzas from Rime of The Ancient mariner, Daffodils, Ozymandias, a few quotes from the Picture of Dorian Gray.

Absolutely nothing. Say it again.

This is the most important.

Except.. you know... the hundreds of thousands of research papers that disagree with you. Different parts of the brain tend to focus on specific senses. Some people exercise one part of the brain more frequently than others, and when their brain is still developing, this preference can manifest itself in different learning styles. It remains somewhat flexible forever but increasingly less so as one ages. This is not controversial

>he considers himself a reader
>he hasnt memorised hamlets to be or not to be soliloquy

If all you're saying is that some people feel like they're visual learners or that eventually develop a habit of only being able to learn visually then I would agree with you. If somebody at a young age begins to earnestly believe they can only learn visually then they will only be able to learn visually, and this may even manifest itself physically with changes in the brain. If I earnestly believed that I couldn't learn math then I wouldn't be able to. That's the self fulfilling prophecy. Brain scans that say people can only learn visually, if such a thing existed, would not be proof to the contrary because it doesn't why that is so. It wouldn't tell us whether such a preference in learning is itself learned or biological.

I think it's interesting that people who supposedly can't remember words have no problem speaking the English language.

If you're not in theatre whats the point?

Nael's (Age 6) poem "The Tiger"

It has nothing to do with what the child believes. If the kids environment constantly stimulates the visual part of the brain but rarely the auditory, then the kid will probably learn better visually in the future because that part of the brain has more neural connections.

>making assumptions when OP has said nothing of what he has memorized.

user, I've memorized scenes from Hamlet, Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, King Lear, Coriolanus, and Timons of Athens, as well as a handful of sonnets. I got my Shakespeare down - I'm looking for other authors.

Invictus
The Suicide Kid
If
Bluebird
a few cantos of Inferno
Into my heart an air that kills
All of my own work

Discounting my own stuff I memorize my favorite poems.

The first bit of lolita

Countless physics and math equations and constants, the atomic masses of half of the elements on the periodic table, some Euclidian proofs

NATO alphabet

seriously? just this thing about
>we used to have a crime problem
>now we have a cop problem
paraphrased from still life with woodpecker

My suicide note. It's compelling to read.

Dear Mom,

Tonight's the night
You might have a scare
Don't worry, though, Dear
I'm not going to go there
To hell and suffer forever in
Pain without the pleasure
But not for eternally shall
Shall I stay in Terra-firma
I am become avalokitesvara
Will I am become avalokitesvara?
We'll see, Dear Mom
Mom, we will see

>suicide note
>making it rhyme
i know you are joking but seriously, youd have to be an asshole to be poetic about your death to your mom. just be sincere.

i was the shadow of the waxwing
slain by the false azure in the window pane
i was the smudge of ashen fluff and i
lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky
and from the inside, too, i'd duplicate
myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate
uncurtaining the night i'd let dark glass
hang all the furniture above the grass

whats your deal

he's a pussy

wtf man

why did you snip my post?

your writing is very classical, reminds me of a refined british gentlemen. i like your style and your message

hey faggot. don't commit suicide. You're just gonna get to the spirit world and remember that you've existed forever and be pissed that you left earth so soon.

That's not me who you're replying to. I don't want to worry anyone, so I'll let you know I'm not suicidical and literally wrote the poem a minute before posting it.

books.google.com/books?id=ik3lxmzE0KkC&pg=PA15&lpg=PA15&dq=The atrophy of memory is the commanding trait in mid and later twentieth-century education and culture. The great majority of us can no longer identify,&source=bl&ots=EvcbCD7HUP&sig=vjTcBLklmBaZdQ6V_ZnywKCzjps&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiszb3o2eLWAhWB34MKHacHCx4Q6AEIJTAA#v=onepage&q=The atrophy of memory is the commanding trait in mid and later twentieth-century education and culture. The great majority of us can no longer identify,&f=false
If you memorized that, you're the bastard I hope you are, if not, I'm still proud of the subtle jab.

Some verses of the Tao Te Ching. I fucking love this shit.

There is something very satisfying about being able to reel off some good poetry in your brain. I'm not convinced that it's actually beneficial in any big way, but I like it. Of course, there is part of me that's just waiting for some situation to arise where I actually need to recite "Ozymandias."

alphabet
i think everyone should memorise it.

I don't try to memorize stuff but I could recite a lot more of Paradise Lost than I'd care to admit.

the navy seal copypasta

correlation does not prove causation. you're going to encounter a lot of people who don't give a shit about poetry or memorization, and frankly, it's a perfectly valid opinion.
I think the next big issue isn't going to be a matter of poor physical conditions, but rather the effect that advanced AI talking over menial jobs will have on the mental state of low skilled workers. Obviously, that's a first world problem...

this guy knows what he's talking about
please take a course in educational psychology n00bs

arse full of farts

From yon far country blows

Wish Peter would read more poetry, even more powerful when surrounded by a gaggle of plebs who think poetry means nothing in the modern world.

youtube.com/watch?v=BHoAQW_DBI4

I've memorized a huge amount of knowledge regarding mainstream Military firearms of the last 120-130 years, including a lot of info about ammunition, and a good chunk of mainstream Military history in general. I've memorized a recipe for making hummus, the method for making hardtack, the method for making sauerkraut, and I also roughly remember the recipe for making black powder (not smokeless gunpowder, but black powder).

I've memorized the song 'Rocky Road to Dublin' and can even sing it off by heart at the necessary speed or potentially even a bit faster (listen to it, and you'll see that's no easy feat). I've memorized the simple process of making sea salt, the process of gutting an animal, and how to cure hide for 1-2 year storage. I used to know the recipe for bread and pancake mix, but I've since forgotten those. I'll re-learn it before too long.

That story of Sir John A MacDonald is awesome.

This to both, you homosexual.

Certainly correlation does not prove causation, but what has happened in the prisons which adopted these programs, as I understand it, had X occur until Y was introduced and then X-prime began to happen. As far as causality seems to occur, that seems pretty damn causal.

Not giving a shit about poetry or memorization is not a valid opinion if it is not underpinned by the reason for such a opinion. The user I was responding to gave his opinion for not valuing the memorization or poetry and the like, and, despite the crudeness and ad hominums, his opinion is valid because showed his underlying concern: 1) Your statement is hyperbolic; 2) Poetry does not directly effect the world in its knowledge; 3) Poetry cannot feed oneself.

From what you wrote, there's no reason to adopt the proposition that not giving a shit about poetry or memorization is a valid opinion. Everyone has a right to their opinion, but if their opinion is invalid then I would dismiss it as such.

Finally, if the next big issue is the mental state of low skilled workers, why not educate such individuals to the poetry and literature and traditions of pain, loss, and mourning? Why not encourage a new generation of poets to address these issues? The human was not designed to work 9-5 in conveyorbelt-driven factories, only to be alienated from their product. The low skilled workers be unemployed; let us then encourage and train them with skills befit for men, including the humanities.

Nice, I didn't realize he had recited the poem previously. I thought the image was non-sequitur. I'll probably have to commit the poem to memory myself.

Ah, a survivalist. Those are certainly wonderful skills/knowledge to possess.

As for Sir John A MacDonald, his life is loaded with these gorgeous anecdotes. Richard Gwyn's two-volume biography is an educative pleasure brimming with all of MacDonald's shenanigans.

Thanks for the compliment, I find survivalism to be absolutely fascinating. I'm going to have to read up on MacDonald if he was indeed that interesting. Almost sounds like a Canadian version of Sir Winston Churchill.

I memorized a lot of the Bhagavad Gita when I wrote my Honors thesis. Wasn't even on purpose, that shit just flows so well together you almost don't have a choice.