For a variety of reasons, I haven’t been sleeping well. At a certain point, I get sick of meditating. Usually I work on memorizing something to pass the time. This is my current earworm, so I thought I might as well learn all the words for the sake of completion when I hear it in my head again and again and again:
And you? What do you memorize for pleasure?
Tolkein.
Lists of Presidents.
Lists of Vice-Presidents (the latter got me through a particularly stressful wait for a court decision I had argued).
The only thing I’ve memorized for my own amusement is the poem Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll. That was back in high school.
Over time, it amused by kids.
As a ten-year-old I memorized Tom Lehrer’s “The Elements” by listening to the record, over and over. Then taught my brother to sing it. We thought we were so special.
Can we still do it? Of course. BFD.
Currently, I’m working on my new school’s alma mater. I’ve done a variety of poems in the past, and a few Shakespearean speeches. I also have a good chunk of the prologue to Canterbury Tales in Middle English, but I never finished the whole prologue.
When I was Best Man for my brother’s wedding, I memorized the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s Forever Young. When I stood up and did my toast, I recited the lyrics slowly. Everyone, including me, had tears in their eyes.
The mother of the bride (may the bitch Rest In Peace) approached my brother at some point and said, “I hope your brother keeps his day job because he’s no poet”. Yes, I was mistaken for Bob Dylan.
I used to like memorizing poetry. I memorized Ozymandias, When I Heard the Learned Astronomer, Churchgoing, Charge of the Light Brigade, The Raven, Invictus, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening and a few others. I found that running through the poems in my head while I was waiting for a bus or a train was a pretty good boredom killer.
I did the Cremation of Sam Mcgee in high school. Later in the USAF I had to memorize some of General Schofield’s address at West Point and Washington’s address to the troops at Valley Forge. I can still remember most of it.
For Insomnia I need something interesting enough that I will do it, but boring enough to produce sleep. Calculating the triangular number sequence does the trick. I usually fade before I get to 20.
Mrs. FtG’s father would get good and oiled up and recite Robert Service. So the older kids ending up memorizing these. And in turn their kids.
It was fun to be a car with a bunch of them and they all start reciting The Cremation of Sam Mcgee in unison.
Outside of things like songs, people just don’t get exposed to poetry and such anymore. Memorizing poems is becoming a lost art. Our tribal ancestor bards from 10,000 years ago would be ashamed.
My forte used to be E.E. Cummings. Jesus he was a handsome man.
My Robert Service book is falling apart, but I still enjoy it once in a while.
Currently I prefer Robinson Jeffers.
That will come in handy if you find yourself in a palindrome competition…
This here ^ made me laugh.
I recite the presidents to myself on the regular. Have not worked up (or down) to the VPs yet.
I also do all the Best Picture Oscar winners, but I’m a little rusty on that right now.
mmm
I tended bar in college, and it was awful slow some nights. I kept a sonnet in my pocket, and would glance at it from time to time as I tried to memorize it. I ended up committing quite a few sonnets to memory.
I have the first several pages of Beowulf as well, and around 25 digits of pi (I used to have 100). If I need to calculate to fall asleep, I do Fibonacci numbers.
Nothing recently, but when I was in high school, my English grade was (somehow) an A- (that was weird because English was my best subject, but I don’t remember what was going on.) Anyway, I asked my teacher if there was a way I could bring it up, and she told me that I could get enough extra credit for memorizing the poem “The Ballad of East and West” to bring it up. I think the margin was reeeallly close. I also don’t think she believed I could do it.
But I loved a challenge.
I think it took me about a week to get it all memorized. I showed up in her classroom after school and proudly recited the whole thing to her.
I got my A.
To this day, over forty years later, I still remember bits and pieces of that poem.
In Genesis the world was made by God’s almighty hand,
In Exodus the Hebrews marched to gain the promised land;
Leviticus contains the Law, holy and just and good,
Numbers records the tribes enrolled – all sons of Abraham’s blood.
etc.