of memory...

"The memorized text interacts with our temporal existence, modifying our experiences, being dialectically modified by them. The stronger the muscles of memory, the better guarded our integral self. Neither sensor nor state police can uproot the remembered poem [...] 

[...] Major epic literature, the founding myths begin to decay with the "advance" into writing. Consciousness is casting overboard its vital ballast.

Secondly, writing arrests, immobilizes discourse. It renders static the free play of thought. 

[...] It is no hyperbole to say that Socrates and Jesus stand at the pivot of our civilization. The passion narratives inspired by their deaths generate the inward alphabets, the encoded recognitions of much of our moral, philosophic, and theological idiom.

[...] My focus here is on teaching, on Mastery and discipleship, in Athens and in Galilee and Jerusalem. 

[...] Where much of Platonic doxa, voiced by Socrates, is articulated via myths, the marrow of Jesus's teaching inheres in parables  — an oral shorthand addressed to memorization. The epistemological status of these two modes, their validity and "truth functions," have been argued over perennially. A cardinal definition of genius points, I believe, to the capacity to originate myths, to devise parables. [...] They are open-ended in that they provoke inexhaustible multiplicities and potentialities of interpretation. They keep the human spirit off-balance. 

[...] But "analogy," itself so slippery a notion, does not get us very far. Like almost no others, the myths recounted by Plato, the parables offered by Jesus, incarnate — I use the word designedly — what is at once decisive and inexplicable in Mastery, in the art of teaching. The hunger of the soul, of the intellect, for meaning, compels the desciple (ourselves) to come back, over and over again, to these texts. This return, always frustrated yet always reborn, may take us as near as is possible to the concept of resurrection. Which is also,  I venture, a metaphor."

Lessons of the Masters, George Steiner