Laudator Temporis Acti

James J. O'Donnell, Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (1998; rpt. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 4-5:

Jerome once ran across a Greek word in a text, and wrote to a friend that he remembered seeing that word only twice elsewhere, once in scripture, once in an apocryphal religious work. As it happens, he was correct: the three passages he knew are the only places (still) where we know that word to have been used in the written legacy of Greek literature. Hearing that story, I marvel at the powers of Jerome's memory, knowing that as a modern scholar with some similar interests in scripture and translation, I would never dare to say such a thing. I attribute this to the distractedness of my education, as well as my inability to read and retain everything that I would like to, but, at bottom, I have a suspicion that in those days people trained their memories to be better than ours are and that weakling reliance on the printed word has sapped our powers of memory.

Another way of looking at it is to say that Jerome's advantage over me lies in the emptiness of his textual memory, not its fullness. He did not have whole ranges of synapses cluttered with lyrics from popular songs of thirty years ago, and other ranges filled with the commands needed to use word processing software already a decade old and obsolete, nor yet again banks of memory taken up with a flood of paperback fiction and nonfiction read on trains, in bed, and on idle Sunday afternoons. If you have read many fewer words in your life, and perhaps read those fewer words over and over again, surely it is easier to remember more of them.

William M. Calder III, "C.M. Bowra on W.S. Barrett: An Unpublished Testimonium," Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 45 (2005) 213–217, at n. 6 on p. 215, quoting a remark by Joshua Whatmough to his students in a class on Greek dialectal inscriptions:

Forgive me if I do not remember your names. To remember them would cause me to forget something more important.