A loaf of bread, a quart of milk, a stick of butter . . .

Okay, one last tidbit from Joshua Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything before I file it away in the proxy memory of my bookshelves. In the course of setting the scene of ancient memory science, Foer cites Pliny the Elder's Natural History,

the first-century encyclopedia that chronicled all things wondrous and useful for winning bar bets in the classical world, including the most exceptional memories then known to history. "King Cyrus could give the names of all the soldiers in his army," Pliny reports. "Lucius Scipio knew the names of the whole Roman people. King Pyrrhus's envoy Cineas knew those of the Senate and knighthood at Rome the day after his arrival. . . . A person in Greece named Charmadas recited the contents of any volumes in libraries that anyone asked him to quote, just as if he were reading them."

And to think I used to be impressed by my ability, years after I was out of college, to remember the names and rooms of everyone who lived in my freshman-year dorm. Sheesh. Clearly I've got to step up my game.

Giulio Camillo's Theater of Memory

Joshua Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything (2011) doesn't hold a lot of surprises for anyone who's already familiar with the ancient mnemonic device of the memory palace, but it's a fun book nonetheless, full of such odd characters as contemporary savants, wildly nerdy mental skill competitors, and historical promulgators of memory enhancement techniques.

The most fascinating member of that last category is Guilio Camillo, an Italian philosopher who in the sixteenth century convinced Francis I of France to fund the construction of a "Theater of Memory" that would essentially be a physical representation of the sort of mental memory palaces that had been crucial to orators, philosophers, and others in the days before printing. Here's how Foer describes what Camillo proposed:

Camillo's wooden memory palace was shaped like a Roman amphitheater, but instead of the spectator sitting in the seats looking down on the stage, he stood in the center and looked up at a round, seven-tiered edifice. All around the theater were paintings of Kabbalistic and mythological figures as well as endless rows of drawers and boxes filled with cards, on which were printed everything that was known, and--it was claimed--everything that was knowable, including quotations from all the great authors, categorized according to subject. All you had to do was meditate on an emblematic image and the entirety of knowledge stored in that section of the theater would be called immediately to mind, allowing you to "be able to discourse on any subject no less fluently than Cicero." Camillo promised that "by means of the doctrine of loci and images, we can hold in the mind and master all human concepts and all the things that are in the entire world."

As you might guess from the mention of the Kabalah, there was to be a mystic, magical component to the memory theater as well, one which Camillo promised he would reveal to no one except Francis I.

It seems a scale model was built and stuffed with, if not the entirety of human knowledge, then at least a substantial number of data cards. Frances Yates, in The Art of Memory (1966), offers a bit more detail:

When next Viglius writes to Erasmus, he has been to Venice and met Camillo, who has allowed him to see the Theatre (it was a theatre, not an amphitheatre, which will appear later). "Now you must know," he writes, "that Viglius has been in the Amphitheatre and has diligently inspected everything." The object was thus clearly more than a small model; it was a building large enough to be entered by two people at once; Viglius and Camillo were in it together.

Viglius's letter continues:

He calls this theatre of his by many names, saying now that it is a built or constructed mind and soul, now that it is a windowed one. He pretends that all things that the human mind can conceive and that we cannot see with the corporeal eye, after being collected together by diligent meditation may be expressed by certain corporeal signs in such a way that the beholder may at once perceive with his eyes everything that is otherwise hidden in the depths of the human mind.

At this distance of time and culture, it's hard to know how seriously to take Camillo's own protestations--for all we know, he may have been wholly sincere in his belief that the proper facts and symbols, properly arranged, could unlock occult secrets. But to modern ears, he certainly does sound like a huckster, doesn't he? And, sadly if not surprisingly, the theater was never built to full scale, and the model disappeared to history before the sixteenth-century was out, so we have little more than tantalizing, if eyebrow-raising, glimpses of Camillo's plans and system.

Yates tells another story about Camillo that, while not bearing on his theater, seems worth sharing:

Camillo and his theater were as much talked about at the French court as they were in Italy, and many legends about his stay in France are extant. The most intriguing of these is the lion story, one version of which is told by Betussi in his dialogues published in 1544. He says that one day in Paris Giulio Camillo went to see some wild animals, together with the Cardinal of Lorraine, Luigi Almoni, and other gentlemen, including Betussi himself. A lion escaped and came towards the party.

The gentlemen were much alarmed and fled hither and thither, except Messr Giulio Camillo, who remained where he was, without moving. This he did, not in order to give proof of himself, but because of the weight of his body, which made his movements slower than the others. The king of animals began to walk round him and caress him, without otherwise molesting him, until it was chased back to its place.

Camillo's own explanation, apparently repeated regularly, was that the lion, a creature of the sun, recognized the "solar virtue" that Camillo bore because of his role as a magus. Did I mention that he comes across like a snake oil salesman?

"With the most possible vigor and imagination," Or, To the new year!

I'll let Dmitry Samarov lead off the new year, with this bit about the holiday from his book Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab:

No one threw up in the cab. In other words, my most fervent New Year's wish had been granted. An indication of a fairly restrained evening. The hordes went about their celebrating with workman-like efficiency; collecting fares did not present any special challenge or above-and-beyond effort, every last rider remembering where he or she lived with a bit of encouragement, no unwelcome advances nor invitations to tussle.

I tend to refer to New Year's as my least favorite holiday of the year, for the simple reason that any holiday whose high point is pegged to an hour that represents the outer limits of my potential bedtime is inherently suspect.

It's not as if parties are really my kind of scene to begin with. I'm much more of a quiet-drink-with-a-friend, long-dinner-party kind of socializer; full-scale parties always leave me a bit at sixes and sevens, feeling that I ought to make an effort to meet strangers but stymied by the fact that they're, well, strangers.

That basic discomfort caused me to smile when I read, in Joshua Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, about the plans that Ed Cooke, a memory contest champion from England, drew up for his twenty-fifth birthday party. Held in a barn on his parents' estate (always a good first item for the party checklist, no?), the party was designed as "an experimental vessel fo his philosophy of parties," a framework, in Cooke's words, "for manipulating conversation, space, movement, mood, and expectations so that I can see how they influence one another." Foer, drawing on notes presumably taken early in the evening's imbibing, explains how Cooke did it:

Glittery textiles hung from the rafters to the floor, dividing the room into a collection of small rooms. The only way in or out was through a network of tunnels, which could be navigated only by slithering on one's belly. The space under the grand piano was turned into a fort, and a circle was formed around the fireplace out of a collection of raggedy couches that had been stacked on top of tables.

"The people who actually get through the tunnel networks have been through an adventure. They have had to struggle a tiny bit, and therefore upon arrival, they feel a sense of gratitude, relief, and accomplishment, and are committed to the project of having a good experience, with the most possible vigor and imagination." . . . I crawled behind him through a ten-foot-long pitch-black tunnel and emerged into a room filled neck-deep with balloons. Each room, he explained, was supposed to function like a chamber of a memory palace. His party was designed to be maximally memorable.

Clearly, Cooke's party wouldn't be for everyone, but I find it attractive: a party with an unusual purpose, a focus, an odd component or three would at a minimum provide strangers with a few minutes of conversational material before the awkward pauses begin to predominate.

This new year's found me laid up with, judging by my cough, some vigorously horrible bastard child of TB and the croup, so I was already asleep when the neighborhood's symphony of illicit fireworks and wailing sirens was just warming up. Dmitry Samarov, I trust, was out all night, just as on that earlier new year's:

The sky is beginning to lighten when I open the mailbox. A letter from the AARP, complete with member's card, awaits my attention. Had this night really lasted a decade? In any case, it is time to reset the calendar and start the whole damn thing over again . . .

Here's to 2012, folks. May it bring you good reading.