It seemed to me that if molecules had holes in them to a certain number, then memory, perchance, might be stored in these holes in the molecules. At least it was more reasonable than the texts I had read. But the calculation, done with considerably higher math than psychologists or biologists use, yet yielded a blank result. I calculated that memory was “made” at a certain rate and was stored in the holes in these punched protein molecules in the form of the most minute energy of which we had any record in physics. But despite the enormous number of molecular holes and the adequate amount of memory, the entire project yielded only this result: I was forced to conclude, no matter how liberal I became, that even with this system, certainly below cellular level, the brain did not have enough storage for more than three months of memory. And in that I could recall things quite vividly, at least before the beginning of the semester, I was persuaded that either the mind could not remember anything or that much smaller energy particles existed than we knew about in nuclear physics.
Amusing, a decade later, this theory, which I had imparted to a very famous psychiatrist complete with the figures, came back as an Austrian “discovery” and was widely accepted as the truth. I always wondered at the psychiatrist’s carelessness in losing that last page which declared by the same calculations that the mind could not remember.
Laying it all aside for a long time I was yet recalled to my calculations by physics itself. There are some odd movements noticeable in atomic and molecular phenomena which aren’t entirely accounted for and supposing that a “smaller” energy might make these movements amongst the larger particles, I came face to face with the grossness of the measuring equipment with which we have always worked in physics. We have only streams of electrons even today to “see small.” And I was so struck with the enormity of the Terra Incognita which physics had yet to invade that it seemed far simpler to do what I eventually did—went off and became a science fiction writer.
Living the rather romantic life of an author in New York, Hollywood and the Northwest, going abroad into savage cultures on expeditions to relax, I did little about my search until 1938 when a rather horrible experience took my mind closer to home than was my usual mental circuit. During an operation I died under the anesthetic.
Brought back to unwillingly lived life by a fast shot of adrenalin into the heart, I rather frightened my rescuers by sitting up and saying, “I know something if I could just think of it.”
In my woods cabin in the Northwest I had quite a little while to think of it. The experience had made me ill enough to keep me in a reading frame of mind and I didn’t get far from a teapot, a blanket and books for some weeks.
The alarm caused those “nearest to me” when I sought to regale them with this adventure of death, amused me. That they were not disturbed that I had actually and utterly died medically and coroneresquely, they were dismayed that I would talk about it. Deciding it was not a popular subject I nevertheless looked into the rather extensive library I sported and found that the thing was not unknown in human experience and that a chap named Pelley had even founded a considerable religious study on it. Quite plausibly he went to heaven and came back and lived to tell of it.
The psychiatric texts which I kept around for unpronounceable ailments to put in the mouths of my fictional doctors were as thoroughly alarmed as my near of kin. They called any such experiences by a nice ugly name, “delusion” and made fat paragraphs out of its mental unhealthiness. Only in that matter of unhealthiness could I agree with them. I always have, always will and did then consider that dying was unhealthy. They also seemed to feel that people who died ought to stay dead. Concluding that the littleness they knew about such happenings was best expressed by the voluminous inconclusions they wrote about it, I turned to the classic philosophers and while these had much to say, very little of it was concisely to the point.
I realized, after wandering through some five hundred pounds of texts, some things which altered my life quite a bit more than merely dying. During those weeks in the cabin my studies pressed me toward some conclusions. I concluded first that dying had not been very damaging. I concluded second that man, as a learned whole, knew damned little about the subject. For better or worse, I concluded that man had better know not just a little more about dying but a lot more about man.
And that shaped my destiny.
