Thanks For The Memory
An excerpt from James T. Como's Branches to Heaven: The Geniuses of C. S. Lewis:
When in his prime in the 1940s and when it was his practice to have students, friends, and colleagues to dinner parties at Magdalen College, Oxford, at which much drinking and even more revelry would transpire, Lewis might perform an astonishing parlor trick. Upon being told how horrible it was to remember nothing, Lewis would reply that it was even worse to forget nothing, as was the case with everything he read. Of course, this declaration would be met with incredulity and demands that he put up or shut up. And so he would solicit a series of numbers from the most skeptical guest, these corresponding to a bookcase, a shelf within that case, and a book upon that shelf. The guest would then fetch the specified volume, which could be in any of several languages, open to a page of his own choosing, read aloud from that page, and stop where he pleased. Lewis would then quote the rest of that page from memory. To the pleasure of all present he would, as John Wain saw, show off.
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