The narrator is obviously fascinated by this guy. But how could that not be fuck and depressing? You know, he's sitting here in a dark room. And the way that he starts talking to him is that funes starts a naming off the cases of prodigious memory that are ctalogued in the naturalist historia. He mentions cyrus, the king of persia, who could call all the soldiers in his armies by name. Mithridates, eupator, who meted out justice in the 22 languages of the kingdom over which he ruled. simonides, the inventor of the art of memory, metrodorus, who was able faithfully to repeat what he
David and Tamler return to Borges land to get lost in the infinite, this time with his legendary and tragic character Funes the memorious. What would it be like to have perfect memory, to have full access to every perceived detail no matter how trivial? Would life be infinitely richer, with present experience and memory merging into a perfect Heraclitan flow? Or is William James correct to say that one condition of remembering is to forget, and that “if we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.”?
Plus, we’re sorry, but after 10 years (!) we thought we had the right to get a little self-indulgent and naval-gazey. We do a bit of reminiscing (“though we have no right to speak that sacred verb..”) in the first segment about how the podcast has changed since 2012, and the impact it has made on our lives. Thanks for the memories!
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