Recovering Our Memory
January 26, 2024
Being executive director of a think tank that monitors the health of marriage and family in America requires me to be intimately familiar with grim news. To keep my spirits buoyed, I’ve made a habit of turning my mind away and allowing it to be absorbed into happier things. Time with my wife and children, prayer, and spiritual retreats have been respites in times of turmoil. But I also have a need for stories—the lighter the better. Wodehouse has done the trick, as have several of Ian Fleming’s evocative Bond books. Most recently, I was captivated by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, which I picked up on the second day of Christmas and finished on the third. I was completely swept away, like Jim Hawkins riding the tide in a coracle boat in pursuit of the Hispaniola. But, as I read, I could not help but be reminded that my mind is weaker than it used to be.
I was a voracious reader when I was young. So tight was the cord between my imagination and the text, nothing would break it, save for a knock on the door or a call to supper. Things are different now. At the age of forty-two, even while reading an enchanting adventure by the likes of Stevenson, I was distracted by the emails that I was not replying to, the “discourse” that was chattering away without my knowledge, the news that was breaking, beckoning me to check in. The repose of a mind at ease among books, undergirded by the power of focus, was all but gone. Now, as Jim and his companions were contending with the plots of Long John Silver and his fellow mutineers, I was fighting the allure of electronic networks calling me back.
