I don't know if this has been attempted before, but I think we should establish a long standing thread of what book each poster would memorize if they had to pick only one with which to restart a barren society.
Mine: THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS by C.S. Lewis.
"Bartleby, The Scrivener" - Herman Melville
shareWell . . .
(1) If we are restarting a barren society we'd want a little help . . . so, from the Bible:
- Any of the four Gospels;
- All 151 (yes 151 not 150) Psalms; or
- Genesis
(2) Language Visible; Unraveling the Mysery of the Alphabet From A to Z by David Sacks. If we are kick-starting literacy we'd need a good book on what letters mean.
(3) The Oxford English Dictionary; we'd have to know the meanings of the words we were reading. Guess I'd have to start with "The Shorter Oxford" or "The Pocket Oxford" . . . eventually work my way up to the full OED. A rather daunting task.
(4) Lord of the Rings: We'd need some contemporary epic literature.
'The Time Machine' or 'War of the Worlds'--H.G. Wells. 'The Aeneid'--Virgil
share[deleted]
What an eclectic thread; what a brave new world with such strange people we'd breed if our canon was what is presented thus far. Things I'd volunteer to memorize (obviously not all of them):
King Lear
MacBeth
Much Ado About Nothing
Oedipus Rex & Antigone [eng. traslations]
Notes from the Underground [short]
The Crying of Lot 49
Dubliners [there's no WAY I'd tackle Ulysses or Finnigan's Wake]
The Short stories of Edgar Allan Poe
The Kama Sutra [hey, we're building a new society...]
The Analects of Confucious
America: The Book by TDS, John Stewart.
"Always look on the bright side of life. Do do. Do do do do do do."
Seeing how dictionaries, holy books of all creeds, and Shakespeare would all probably be pretty well covered by my brothers in sisters in the revolution, I'd take one for the nation by learning by heart the full six volumes of the Clarendon edition of Burton's "The Anatomy Of Melancholy" from 1621. Reading it out loud 'round the campfire would surely carry our rugged band through many a hard winter.
Cheers,
Peter.
sacred hoops by phil jackson, or A thousand plateus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
however, the only applicable answer here is Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.
Very interesting thread...I'm an actor in community theater, so I memorize large volumes of text, mostly dialog, all the time! It's rarely an easy task. I recently had to learn the role of Jesse in Act II of Neil Simon's Plaza Suite, and do it in just ten days, when another actor had to drop out. I had already memorized the role of Roy in Act III. The additional difficulty in stage drama is that you have to memorize blocking (movements) and personality elements as well. The hardest task is trying to memorize disconnected dialog...when two or more people are talking "at" each other, in different directions or on entirely different subjects, as opposed to coordinated dialog. You can't depend on mnemonic-based cues. Monologues...speeches...are actually very easy to memorize using simple progressive repetition drill. Of course, if you don't continue drilling, eventually the continuity of what you memorized drops out of long-term memory and you only occasionally remember a few distinctive phrases.
So what would I memorize? The Collected Plays of Joe Orton, I imagine...