You Must Remember This - The American Scholar

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Cover Story

You Must Remember This

On the nature of autobiographical memory

By Jonathan Weiner<br>June 1, 2026

Illustration by Brian Stauffer

1.

My memory is legendary in the family, and though it’s wearing thin now, getting patchy in places, I still remember when the legend began.

It was the fall of 1959, when I was five, and we had just gotten home from a year of travel in Italy, with stays in Perugia, Florence, and Rome. My father was a scientist at Columbia back then, and the trip was his first sabbatical. He was finishing a book he was writing with his friend and colleague Bruno Boley, Theory of Thermal Stresses, which would become a bible for the kinds of engineers who designed NASA rockets, satellites, and heat shields.

Now we were back in Hillsdale, New Jersey. One evening, my father brought out a brand-new Kodak slide projector and set it up on a footstool in the living room. I remember the room, can still hear the whir of the projector’s fan and smell again the hot, sourish smell from the projector bulb. I remember where my father stood (by the new projector), where my mother sat (in the armchair next to it), and where I sat or lay (on the rug). My little brother, Eric, was already asleep, I think.

Slide.

It was a scene from months before. In the picture I was crouched in the middle of a dusty path, under the hot sun, digging in the dirt with my bare hands.

“That’s Monte Testaccio!” I said. “That was the first thing we did in Rome. There was a stone in the middle of the road, and I was trying to dig it out. You and Mom and Eric kept on walking,” I told my father. “Then you stopped and turned around and called me to catch up. You said we would find much better things up ahead.”

Monte Testaccio was a lonesome, scruffy hill, the remains of an ancient Roman garbage dump. In those days there weren’t as many tourists in Rome, and we had the hill to ourselves. My father told us to wander around, and we went rambling as if we were picking up shells and pebbles at the beach. My brother and I found little bits of broken pots. Sitting there in our darkened living room, I could still see each one. “You found the best piece,” I said to my father. I saw his find in my mind’s eye, and I can almost see it now, a brown, neatly turned terracotta jug handle.

Slide.

“That was also our first day in Rome!” I said. We had gone for a family walk down a broad avenue. I remembered the row of blinkered horses and carriages that stood and waited at the curb, and just beyond them, the crazy Roman traffic. “A man threw his cigarette into the street,” I said. “I ran into the street to put it out. You ran after me,” I told my father. “You got me back to the sidewalk. You shouted, ‘You don’t run out into the street!’ ”

As I sat there on the living room rug, the whole scene was still right there before me.

“I said, ‘There was a cigarette. I was afraid it would start a fire.’ You shouted, ‘That cigarette will go out by itself!’ ”

“What a memory you have, Giannetto!” my father said.

2.

I also remember writing my first line. It was that same year—1959—the first week of September, midafternoon. Again, I can bring back the whole scene: where I sat at the kitchen table, the precise angle of the light on the leaves of the maple trees outside the picture window, the awkwardness of driving the pencil, even the smell of the paper.

(Mimeograph paper, which smelled like pineapples.)

I’m not like Funes the Memorious, in the short story by Jorge Luis Borges. Funes could remember (in the translation of Anthony Kerrigan) “the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho.” I couldn’t tell you what I had for dinner, say, on the night of Tuesday, October 2, 1962.

However, I am memorious enough that scenes from the past are always present, always ready to be summoned up. I time-travel all the time, voluntarily and involuntarily. I remember doing this even at the age of five or six. In one memory, I’m lying in the driveway—for some reason—and looking up at the sky while remembering scene after scene from the year before, and I can still recall a few of the scenes that came to me as I lay there.

While walking my dog in the park not long ago, listening to an interview with the writer John Jeremiah Sullivan, I recognized a fellow traveler. The interviewer, Max Linsky, asked him about his relationship to memory. Sullivan replied, “As I come up on 50, I find myself wishing that my memory weren’t as good as it is, you know?”

This was the gist of their conversation:

ML: You want it to be worse?

JJS: Sometimes I just feel like I don’t forget anything. And I’m constantly...