art of memory

Matthew Freestone · 04 Apr 1998, 12:32 · from urth-v0009.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Matthew Freestone <matthew at matthewf.demon.co.uk>
Subject: (urth) art of memory
Date: Sat, 4 Apr 1998 13:32:02 +0100
Message-ID: <urth-v0009-0711 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0009/0711.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable


[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other work=
s]

>From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>

>Weer's house also recalls the old (medieval?) technique of memory by
>constructing a mental "castle" and, in the mind's eye, placing each thing
>or event you want to remember in a seperate room of your castle, using
>images to represent what you want to remember. =20
The techniques of artificial memory are much older than the middle ages.
In fact, Simonides, in the Soldier books, was one of the great
practitioners of the art in classical times.=20
Frances Yates' book "The Art of Memory" is a fascinating history of the
subject. It crops up in John Crowley's "AEgypt", and "Little, Big" too.

Best,
--                              II         |\      _,,,---,,_
Matt Freestone                  II    zzz. /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_.
matthew at matthewf.demon.co.uk    II        |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'
www.matthewf.demon.co.uk/       II       '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)


*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net