Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama by Sam Leith

Author:Sam Leith
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780465031078
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2016-04-25T14:00:00+00:00

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:

These backgrounds ought to be of moderate size and medium extent, for when excessively large they render the images vague, and when too small often seem incapable of receiving an arrangement of images. Then the backgrounds ought to be neither too bright nor too dim, so that the shadows may not obscure the images nor the lustre make them glitter. I believe that the intervals between backgrounds should be of moderate extent, approximately thirty feet; for, like the external eye, so the inner eye of thought is less powerful when you have moved the object of sight too near or too far away.5

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