In a more general vein: that which we know by heart will ripen and deploy within us. The memorized text interacts with our temporal existence, modifying our experiences, being dialectically modified by them. The stronger the muscles of memory, the better guarded our integral self. Neither censor nor state police can uproot the remembered poem (witness the survival, from mouth to mouth, of Mandelstam’s poems where no written version was feasible). In the death camps, certain rabbis and Talmudic scholars were known to be “living books,” the pages of whose total recall could be “turned” by other inmates in search of judgment or consolation.
–George Steiner, Lessons of the Masters
