Våra opålitliga minnen

Få projekt känns mer angelägna och intellektuellt stimulerande än det att försöka förstå det mänskliga psyket. Neurologen och författaren Oliver Sacks har i årtionden tillämpat strategin att studera avvikelser och patologier - inte sällan i kombination med skoningslös introspektion - i hopp om att dessa skall sprida ljus över hur vi är funtade. Och strategin fungerar. Det finns få böcker som skänkt mig större insikter, och som jag varmare vill rekommendera, än hans på egna fallstudier byggda essäsamlingar The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985) och An Anthropologist on Mars (1995). Han har ofta bidragit till husorganet New York Review of Books, alltid med läsvärda texter, som t.ex. tidigare i år med Speak, Memory - en djupdykning i våra långtidsminnens fallerbarhet. Här använder han sig bland annat av erfarenheterna från sin egen barndomsskildring Uncle Tungsten (2001) och de felaktigheter som där till hans stora förvåning visat sig föreligga:

I accepted that I must have forgotten or lost a great deal, but assumed that the memories I did have—especially those that were very vivid, concrete, and circumstantial—were essentially valid and reliable; and it was a shock to me when I found that some of them were not.

A striking example of this, the first that came to my notice, arose in relation to the two bomb incidents that I described in Uncle Tungsten, both of which occurred in the winter of 1940–1941, when London was bombarded in the Blitz:

One night, a thousand-pound bomb fell into the garden next to ours, but fortunately it failed to explode. All of us, the entire street, it seemed, crept away that night (my family to a cousin’s flat)—many of us in our pajamas—walking as softly as we could (might vibration set the thing off?). The streets were pitch dark, for the blackout was in force, and we all carried electric torches dimmed with red crêpe paper. We had no idea if our houses would still be standing in the morning.

On another occasion, an incendiary bomb, a thermite bomb, fell behind our house and burned with a terrible, white-hot heat. My father had a stirrup pump, and my brothers carried pails of water to him, but water seemed useless against this infernal fire—indeed, made it burn even more furiously. There was a vicious hissing and sputtering when the water hit the white-hot metal, and meanwhile the bomb was melting its own casing and throwing blobs and jets of molten metal in all directions.

A few months after the book was published, I spoke of these bombing incidents to my brother Michael. Michael is five years my senior, and had been with me at Braefield, the boarding school to which we had been evacuated at the beginning of the war (and in which I was to spend four miserable years, beset by bullying schoolmates and a sadistic headmaster). My brother immediately confirmed the first bombing incident, saying, “I remember it exactly as you described it.” But regarding the second bombing, he said, “You never saw it. You weren’t there.”

I was staggered by Michael’s words. How could he dispute a memory I would not hesitate to swear on in a court of law, and had never doubted as real? “What do you mean?” I objected. “I can see the bomb in my mind’s eye now, Pa with his pump, and Marcus and David with their buckets of water. How could I see it so clearly if I wasn’t there?”

“You never saw it,” Michael repeated. “We were both away at Braefield at the time. But David [our older brother] wrote us a letter about it. A very vivid, dramatic letter. You were enthralled by it.” Clearly, I had not only been enthralled, but must have constructed the scene in my mind, from David’s words, and then appropriated it, and taken it for a memory of my own.

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