Fats, returning to English, explains one of the more fascinating traditions of pétanque: the loser of a 13 – 0 shutout has to kiss the bare bottom of a girl named Fanny. For real. In twenty-first-century France, Fats notes with some disgust, a pictorial representation is usually substituted for the real thing—apparently it is not uncommon to see a fanny poster nailed to a tree at a boulodrome—either because no one is named Fanny anymore (could pétanque possibly be the reason why?) or because it was suspected that Frenchmen were throwing matches in order to get a smooch with Fanny’s ass.
“No time for Fanny,” I say, realizing with a bit of panic just how true that is. I rush to the doctor’s office, breathlessly arriving two minutes before my appointment, only to wait two hours before being seen. I could’ve gotten a couple more fannies in.
IT DOESN’T TAKE THREE minutes with Dr. Larry Chinitz to realize you’re talking to a very smart guy, possessing that kind of self-assuredness that surgeons often wear like a suntan (and he’s got a pretty good one of those as well). I normally don’t take to such people, but confidence is exactly what you want if the guy’s going to be turning your heart into a shooting gallery. There is a potential cure for my condition, a procedure called radiofrequency catheter ablation, Chinitz explains, during which several catheters are snaked up from the groin into the heart via the blood vessels. Once inside, they hunt around for several hours like long-necked alien robots from science fiction movies (my analogy, not his), twisting, turning, probing for the “hot spots” that are causing the arrhythmia, which they then cauterize with radiofrequency energy.
I listen dumbly as Chinitz explains the procedure. This is not exactly a stroll along the Seine. “And it usually fixes the AFib? Forever?” I ask.
“Usually. In a few cases, especially if you’ve been in arrhythmia for a long time, a second ablation is required. But one generally does the trick.”
“Risks?”
Complications, which occur in 2 to 3 percent of cases, range from bleeding at the groin to stroke. “But these tend to be in older or less healthy patients. Someone like you should expect a good outcome.”
Yeah, well, someone like me ought to be speaking French by now, too. Which I decide to bring up, even though the appointment is running long and there are people in his packed waiting room who look like they’ve been there since the Restoration.
“Learning French is surprisingly stressful,” I explain, on my way to asking if in his medical opinion I should quit, not sure of the answer I want to hear.
Before I can get there, this bilingual heart surgeon who earns his living inside other people’s hearts says, “It is?” raising his eyebrows, and I feel foolish. “I’d think it would be fun.”
“Oh, it is! There’s something very soothing, even meditative, about putting on the headphones every morning and just getting lost in French for an hour. But it’s just so much harder than I expected. I can’t remember the silly words; it’s so complicated, with all these dumb endings, and the pronunciation is impossible—and when I have to speak to anyone, I feel like a fool.” I tell him how my initial AFib episode came on the heels of a difficult online class, and he smiles.
Chinitz, I learn, does not subscribe to the school of thought that atrial fibrillation is caused by stress, anxiety, moderate alcohol use (except in a very few sensitive individuals), caffeine, or French. He apparently hasn’t used Rosetta Stone. What I neglected to mention in my soliloquy on the transcendent mornings of French is that they are punctuated by periods of sheer frustration. I almost threw my laptop out the window the other day because the Rosetta speech recognition engine would not accept my pronunciation of some simple sentence, no matter what twist I gave it. This meant I couldn’t advance to the next screen; I was stuck, held hostage by my bad accent. My frustration mounted as the minutes ticked by, my heart pounding, and work beckoning.
I went into the program settings and changed the voice recognition sensitivity from moderate to easy. Still no luck. I resorted to screaming at the computer, hurling insults, French and English, until one of them—too crude to repeat here—apparently sounded close enough to the sentence it wanted that, to my utter amazement, the next screen popped up. Either that or I’d intimidated the program into submission. Or worn it out.
Which would be fair game, as French is wearing me out, although not as much as my heart troubles. So why not ouvre mon cœur up to Dr. Chinitz? Because, for one thing, I’m peureux—chickenhearted. The risk Chinitz cited sounds high to me, not low. Look at it this way: would you board a plane that, you were told beforehand, had a 2 to 3 percent chance of “complications”?
For another thing, I’m worried about the effect of hours of anesthesia on my brain. What if I wake up and find that I’ve forgotten what little French I’ve learned? Or worse, some of the English? My memory, which was bad to begin with (remember my abysmal cognitive-testing scores) is getting worse, and the harder I study French, the worse it seems to get.
“THE SUGAR?” ANNE ASKS a couple of days later, standing over a half-finished peach pie. I’ve just come back from the grocery store with the chicken, the potato chips, and the milk, but not the sugar, the main reason I went to begin with.
“I’m sorry. I have to start writing things down. I guess the longest mental list I can keep in my head is three items.”
The previous evening, I had made dinner for guests, a pasta dish I’ve made dozens of times and have well committed to memory. Or had. “I also left out the egg last night,” I muse aloud. “I thought maybe that learning French might make me smarter, but I’m turning into the village idiot.”
Anne stops what she is doing and taps me gently on the forehead, leaving a spot of flour. “There’s only so much room in there,” she says. “Let me show you.” She tilts her head far to the right as if trying to get water out of her ear and moves a pointed index finger toward her raised left ear. “French in!” Then she mimes something coming out of the other ear with her right index finger. “Oops! Egg out!”
She straightens up. “¿Entiendes? ”
Yes, I understand, although I do wish she’d stop speaking Spanish. And I also wonder whether the great French experiment might be about over, whether it’s time to throw in the towel, or as the French would say, c’est la fin des haricots! (It’s the end of the beans!) Memory loss, heart rhythm loss . . . and I do wonder whether my heart worries are contributing to my inability to focus on French. Not only is it “French in, egg out”; lately it’s been “French in, French out.” I complain to Anne, “It seems that for every new word I learn, I forget a previous one. Moreover, as the lessons progress, the new words are getting more and more obscure. So I know the word for ‘crutches’—and God help me if I ever need to know the French word for ‘crutches’—but I’ve forgotten how to say ‘next.’ ‘Next’! This is absurd; the more French I study, the less useful French I know!”
“Your brain is saturated,” she says. “There’s no more room.”
“Well, I have to make some room.” This conversation is starting to sound eerily familiar. The connection comes to me. “Sherlock Holmes.”
“Huh?”
“In the very first Sherlock Holmes story, ‘A Study in Scarlet,’ Watson is astounded to learn that Holmes is unaware of Copernicus’s discovery three hundred years earlier that the earth revolves around the sun. And Holmes says something like, ‘What the deuce is it to me whether the earth revolves around the sun or the other way around? The mind is like an attic, with a finite amount of space, and a fool fills it up with every piece of junk he comes across, so it soon gets filled up and he can’t uncover the important stuff that’s up there. But a wise man only brings in the materials and tools that are of the most use to him.’ ” (I was a Sherlock Holmes geek as a child.)
Is my brain maxed out? Have I really reached the point of French in, French out? Or do I just need a furniture arranger, an interior decorator for my attic-brain? As it turns out, one is about to show up.
THE
HISTORY OF MEMORY is generally dated to the legendary story related by Cicero about a tragic incident that occurred back in the fifth century BC. The Greek poet Simonides of Ceos was attending a banquet, the story goes, and had just stepped outside to have a smoke or take a phone call or something, when the palace collapsed, killing everyone inside, leaving the corpses so crushed under tons of stone that identification of the victims was impossible. One could not even say for sure who was inside. Families rushed to Simonides, asking if their loved ones were among the victims.
“How the hell should I know?” he might’ve said (except that the concept of hell was still a few centuries off ), for he certainly hadn’t taken attendance or even paid much attention. Yet, in the desperation of the moment, Simonides did a creative and unique thing. He closed his eyes and rebuilt the palace in his head, replaying his entrance and exit through the hall, visualizing the scene—“Ah, I nodded hello to Pseudolus on the way in, and remember wondering, how did he get a date with that cute Philia”—and re-creating in his mind’s eye the seating arrangements. In this manner he was able to recall a remarkable number of those in attendance.
This event is the origin of the memorization technique known today, with a nod to Simonides, as the memory palace, a familiar room (or village or route) in which you strategically place the items you are memorizing. The Romans called it the method of loci (loci being Latin for “places”), and you may also hear it referred to as the peg system, for in one variant you hang the objects you are trying to remember on pegs in a familiar place.
The memory palace seems to be most effective when, instead of imaging the mundane object you are trying to remember, you substitute something related but more outrageous that will recall the object. Joshua Foer, who used the system to become the United States memory champion, gives the example of having to memorize a long shopping list that includes a snorkel and cottage cheese. He constructs his palace in his home, but instead of placing the snorkel on, say, the kitchen counter, he visualizes a man snorkeling in his kitchen sink, a much more bizarre—and therefore memorable—image. For the cottage cheese, he summons up Claudia Schiffer swimming in a vat of cottage cheese.
Memory techniques were in vogue in ancient times, before the advent of the written word, when possessing a sound memory was crucial, not only for shopping lists, but for everything. There is no question that the ancients had better memories than we do today. Without their extraordinary memories we’d have no Iliad or Odyssey, then or now. When the first writing systems appeared, there was much hand-wringing over what some saw as the inevitable demise of memory—a debate reawakened in the Internet age, when once again we are worrying about whether memory will become a sort of vestigial organ. After all, why memorize something when you can google it from your smartphone?
As writing reached the masses, the teaching of formal memory techniques fell out of fashion, but after hearing an interview with Foer, I wonder whether using the memory palace could help me with my French. Initially I’d thought not, because the operative word here is learning. That is, I am learning a language, not memorizing a few dozen handy phrases (Où sont les toilettes?) of the kind often supplied in guidebooks.
Well, a little research reveals that some linguists have indeed been promoting (and, naturally, others deriding) a mnemonic approach to learning foreign vocabulary for at least the past thirty years. Called the keyword method, this technique is a simple two-step process: Step one, take the foreign word and think of an English word (the keyword) that sounds like the foreign word. Step two, form an image in your mind that links the foreign and English words. For example, say you are trying to memorize the French word for “bread,” pain (pronounced something like “pah”). This is close to “pan.” So visualize a pan. Now picture that pan coming out of the oven filled with bread, and concentrate on that image for a few seconds. Bake it into your brain. Now, the next time you see the French word pain, you should be able to conjure up this picture, and say, “Aha, bread!”
How is this any better than simply memorizing that pain means “bread”? For the same reason that Simonides’s memory palace technique works: the mind is remarkably adept at remembering images, but not so good at retaining words. In fact, the average adult can remember a list of only seven items (my own limit, as we have seen, is closer to three). It makes sense, evolutionarily speaking, that humans are better at remembering images than they are at remembering words, since we acquired sight way, way before we developed speech, not to mention writing. For that reason, various forms of visualization constitute the primary technique employed by all contemporary memory experts. The most common technique for memorizing the order of a deck of playing cards (a classic memory competition event) is to substitute a vivid image for each of the fifty-two cards in a deck.
Simple enough. Some months earlier I’d bought, and tried to memorize, an English-French children’s dictionary of a thousand simple words. I never got past C. I retrieve the book and start again, this time using the mnemonic keyword technique. For se plaindre (to complain), I picture a bunch of talking plantains complaining about me every time I walk by. Funny. One word that has evaded me for weeks is autoriser, a verb meaning “to give permission.” I close my eyes and picture myself in my mechanic’s garage asking him for permission to put my car on his lift—his auto riser. Bingo. Ten minutes later, I test myself with a handful of new words, and pass. But as I add words, I start forgetting earlier words. It seems there is, as Anne (and Sherlock) had surmised, only so much room in there. My attic-brain is overfilled, bursting at the rafters.
To my dismay, though, two objects that seem to have taken up permanent residence—and precious room—in the attic are the snorkeler in my kitchen sink and poor Claudia Schiffer, still stuck in that vat of cottage cheese. I mean, I just can’t get these images, which I’d had no intention of memorizing, out of my head. At the same time, I’ve forgotten the past tense of “to have.” Clearly, Claudia is trying to tell me something. There must be a way to use the memory palace with French. I return to my English-French children’s dictionary, opening it at the bookmarked letter C, and, covering the French translation, look at the word “coat.” Damn, I had that word in seventh grade, again in high school, while prepping for French trips, and once again just a few months ago, not to mention the last time I was on this very dictionary page. But I still haven’t learned it.
Okay, I’m going to build a memory palace and stick a coat in it. But where? I move my hand to reveal the translation: manteau. Borrowing from the keyword method of association, I first connect it to mantel. Then, constructing a memory palace, I place the coat on the fireplace mantel in my living room. Mantel/manteau. Good match, but a coat on a mantel is not very memorable. So let’s put a man inside the coat and give him a hat, a chapeau. Ah, he just became a British chap.
Any well-dressed British chap up on a mantel needs an umbrella, that wonderful French word parapluie, which can double as a parachute if he needs to jump off. His wife, an unfortunate, homeless bag lady, wears a diamond bague on her finger. This couple’s daughter is jumping rope in her skirt ( jupe), impermeable to the rain that’s falling onto her yellow imperméable. As kids are wont to do, she is pull ing constantly at the sleeve of her sweater ( pull ).
But what is this strange crew doing in my living room? Sadly, it’s a wake for the son, a ten-year-old kid, laid out in a casket wearing a baseball cap (casquette) and sneakers (baskets) under a basket ball hoop. I run through the scene with this odd family, whom I’m starting to enjoy, a few times in my head, jot down some notes, and test myself an hour later. Still there. The next day, the next week, still there. Thus it seems that while the keyword method itself doesn’t work and the memory palace doesn’t even really apply (it’s usually employed to memorize mere lists of items), combining the two methods—assigning a keyword and placing that object in a palace—clicks! Of course, a week is one thing, but the big question remains: Will the French Addams family still be jumping rope in my living room
during a wake in the rain next month, or next year, or will they have gotten bored and left? My guess is that to keep them there, I’ll have to visit often.
Well, how many words can one memorize with this method? For starters, how about I try the thousand words in my children’s English-French dictionary? Returning to the letter A, I divide the words that I don’t know into themed rooms. The first room I build is an action room, for verbs. Nothing says “action” like a gym, so for this room I choose my former health club. As I enter, I see a strongman bench-pressing in a hurry (être pressé), while another athlete fills up (remplir) a water bottle to replenish his thirst, and so on. The next day, I’ll revisit the gym, along with what has turned out to be my clothing-themed room (the Addams family), and begin the construction of my adjective room (the reading room of the New York Public Library), then a weather and outdoors room (the beach—it doesn’t have to be a real room), and more.
When I need to retrieve a word, I simply go to the appropriate room and conjure up the right character. I review these lists nightly, and at some point I realize I’ve stopped using the keyword. I don’t need to see the boy lying in a casket to recall the casquette on his head anymore, but the association is there if I need it.
When I’ve built and populated all my rooms, I give myself a test, running through the entire thousand-word dictionary from A to Z. My score: 98.5 percent. In ten days, not ten weeks or ten months, I’ve memorized virtually the entire Mon premier Bescherelle anglais!
STILL UNDECIDED ABOUT SURGERY, I worry that a few hours of anesthesia could sweep clean not only my carefully constructed memory palace rooms but some far more critical rooms—say, the ones in which I have my kids’ names and where I live. And then there’s that small percentage of complications, which I’ve magnified with my plane analogy. Still, if there’s a good chance that a single procedure could fix my heart, could get that balky left atrium beating regularly again, why would I pass that up? “I’m only fifty-seven,” I tell Anne.
Flirting with French: How a Language Charmed Me, Seduced Me, and Nearly Broke My Heart Page 10
