Summary by Claude

The Steiner piece on memorization as resistance is profound—“put luggage inside” is such a visceral way to think about knowledge. Not just having information accessible, but having it in you—something that shapes how you think and feel, that you can draw on when everything else falls away. The metaphor of “inner ballast” captures something essential: what you memorize sustains you when hardship strikes.

The connection between the Rodrigues performance and Steiner’s philosophy is elegant. Teaching audience members to memorize a Shakespeare sonnet isn’t just a theatrical exercise—it’s an embodiment of memorization as spiritual survival. Ten people coming together to learn something by heart—that’s not about information transfer, it’s about transformation. The performance demonstrates how memorization is both deeply personal and inherently communal.

This feels particularly urgent in the age of AI and instant access to information. When everything is externalized and retrievable, what gets lost? Steiner’s “organized amnesia” seems even more relevant now. We’re optimizing for quick access over deep internalization, for breadth over the kind of knowledge that becomes part of your being.

There’s also something here about the difference between knowing about something and knowing it “by heart.” The former is transactional; the latter is relational. You carry it with you. It carries you.

And the political dimension: memorization as an act of cultural preservation and resistance. “As long as ten people know a poem, it will live.” In contexts of oppression or erasure, what you hold in memory becomes what survives. The Soviet writers who were memorized in darkness. The texts that couldn’t be burned because they lived in people.

This connects interestingly to your Socratic AI work—the tension between using AI to externalize thinking versus using it to deepen your own internal capacity. The question isn’t whether to use AI, but how to use it in ways that build ballast rather than creating dependency. How do we use these tools to put more luggage inside, not less?

Memorization as resistance and internal ballast. George Steiner, who fled Nazi-occupied France as a child, argues that what you memorize becomes “luggage inside”—knowledge that sustains you when everything else is stripped away. In modern schooling’s “organized amnesia,” we’ve lost the art of remembrance, leaving people empty when hardship strikes. Tiago Rodrigues’s performance “By Heart” embodies this philosophy by bringing ten audience members onstage to collectively memorize a Shakespearean sonnet—a communal act that demonstrates how memorization is both deeply personal and inherently political.

By Heart

George Steiner on Of Beauty and Consolation

Full interview with George Steiner - part one - YouTube🔗

Schedule

Monday, November 3, 2025

7:30 PM

Tuesday, November 4, 2025

7:30 PM

Please note: no late seating. Please arrive on time to ensure entry.

Duration: 105 minutes

Returning to Crossing The Line after his directorial work on last year’s Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists, Tiago Rodrigues presents another internationally acclaimed performance—only this time, he’s directing his audience. Ten audience members come together onstage for an act of collective memorization, learning a Shakespearean sonnet by heart. The results are, according to a New York Times Critic’s Pick review, “miraculous ... [a] communal act of translation,” performed while Rodrigues offers direction and commentary on the transformative personal and political dimensions of memorization.

“Rodrigues uses his memorization exercise to create an intimate performance that connects people through text.” — Maya Phillips, The New York Times

Enjoy the best of Crossing The Line at L’Alliance New York! Purchasing a Festival Pass will give you access to all five Crossing The Line programs taking place at L’Alliance New York—at 30% off the list price!

Steiner

Learning by Heart with Miss Duffy — TOD WORNER🔗

As an eleven-year-old refugee fleeing Nazi-occupied France in 1940, scholar and essayist George Steiner learned from his father a crucial lesson: “one of the things my father taught me was: always have your bags packed.” This wasn’t merely about physical belongings—it spoke to safeguarding the stories, memories, beliefs, and moral foundations that define identity. In this imperative lies the deeper purpose of memorization.

Steiner would explain:

Most of present schooling is organized amnesia. It takes away the arts of remembrance. . . . It leaves people with very little inner ballast. Now, that’s fine when all is going well. When all is going well and you’re beautiful, young, and earning a lot, then you can sail very lightly before the wind. Be careful. When things start going wrong—health, loneliness, the most natural things—what you carry inside you, they can’t take away from you. . . . Put luggage inside—that’s the only way I can express it—[so that] when the wind starts blowing very hard, you have ballast. We are taking that away from our young and we are leaving them, very often, tremendously empty.

Reflecting on writers who vanished during Soviet terror, Steiner observed that their works endure precisely because people committed them to memory in those dark times.

“As long as ten people know a poem, it will live.” We must learn some things by heart, he insisted. “The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart. . . . What you know by heart, the bastards cannot touch; they cannot take it from you.”