We started in the French Lyceé, tiny children in those ridiculous blue Smocks: five lines and ten lines and twenty; learning by heart. For what you love, you will want to have inside you. We learned Pope’s Iliad by rote. We learned Lear’s nonsense rhymes by heart. Those children learned to tell the two apart and never say, "that ought I wrote in love I wrote only for love of art." These lines of Robert Graves accompany me day and night. But there are so many others. What you have by heart, no one can touch. They cannot take it from you.

Consider the example of a Russian woman who was a teacher of English Romantic literature in the University in Kazakhstan. It was the Brezhnev years, relatively less hellish than Stalin, but still hell. She was imprisoned, with no light, on some trumped up charge, for three years, in solitary. Now, in Russia, for reasons I am not wholly competent to judge, Byron’s Don Juan has canonic presence. It’s regarded, maybe justly, as one of the transcendent achievements. This young woman knew it, thirty or thirty-four thousand lines by heart. And in the dark she dictated to herself a Russian verse translation. She lost her sight. But when she emerged, she dictated her translation, which is now the classic one in Russian. There is nothing you can do to a human being who is like that. No state can touch this. No despair can touch it. What you don’t know by heart, you really haven’t loved deeply enough. The poetry of Mandelstam, you remember, survived when Nadezhda, after the death of the poet, had ten people, no more, learning one of the poems. That was enough. There were no copies, and the KGB could do nothing. As long as ten people know a poem, it will live. Ben Johnson had the wonderful word for it, which we have lost: to ingest the text, to internalize it in the viscera of your spirit. The culture decays in precise proportion to its neglect, or suppression of memorization.

Again, in the Russian Writers’ Congress of ’37, in the blackness of the blackness, Boris Pasternak was told, "If you speak, we arrest you. If you don’t, we arrest you, as a sign of contempt" Pasternak was tall, very handsome; he stood out in a crowd fantastically. On the third morning his friends said, "Boris, say something. They are going to arrest you, but say something. Give us something to remember, to live by." When the moment came, Boris got up and spoke a number. It took twenty seconds, maybe thirty, before two thousand people rose, holding hands, and began to recite Shakespeare’s sonnet of that number, of which Pasternak’s translation is a Russian classic, like Pushkin. He spoke out loud, "When I summon up remembrance of things past," and they didn’t dare touch him. That culture was never in ultimate danger. Ours is every day. There is an immense difference. “When I summon up remembrance of things past.”