Words Like Loaded Pistols by Sam Leith

Author:Sam Leith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465031078
Publisher: Basic Books

The artificial memory includes backgrounds and images. . . . We shall need to study with special care the backgrounds we have adopted so that they may cling lastingly in our memory, for the images, like letters, are effaced when we make no use of them, but the backgrounds, like wax tablets, should abide.

Ad Herennium is actually—and, to me, fascinatingly—almost insanely specific about how these backgrounds should be arranged in the mind’s eye. The author wants something uncluttered. He favors a deserted area to a populous one, so as to avoid passersby crowding and weakening the images—as if to suggest that if you were to choose Times Square for your memory palace, the crowds in the real Times Square would somehow impinge to damage your memory.

He seems to prefer clean lines, but warns that the backgrounds should nevertheless differ in shape and form (a series of intercolumnar spaces—I imagine a long cloister, from his description—will provoke confusion because too alike), and suggests that confusion can be avoided by marking off every fifth background space with a golden hand, and having “an acquaintance whose name is Decimus” loiter in every tenth one.

The next bit—because it seems to me to speak of an inner eye so well developed as to be different in kind from our own—is worth quoting in full:

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