Moonwalking With Einstein (16 page)

The first concordance of the Bible, a grand index that consumed the labors of five hundred Parisian monks, was compiled in the thirteenth century, around the same time that chapter divisions were introduced. For the first time, a reader could refer to the Bible without having previously memorized it. One could find a passage without knowing it by heart or reading the text all the way through. Soon after the concordance, other books with alphabetical indexes, page numbers, and tables of contents began to appear, and as they did, they again helped change the essence of what a book was.

The problem of the book before the index and table of contents is that for all the material contained in a scroll or between the covers of a book, it was impossible to navigate. What makes the brain such an incredible tool is not just the sheer volume of information it contains but the ease and efficiency with which it can find that information. It uses the greatest random-access indexing system ever invented—one that computer scientists haven’t come even close to replicating. Whereas an index in the back of a book provides a single address—a page number—for each important subject, each subject in the brain has hundreds if not thousands of addresses. Our internal memories are associational, nonlinear. You don’t need to know where a particular memory is stored in order to find it. It simply turns up—or doesn’t—when you need it. Because of the dense network that interconnects our memories, we can skip around from memory to memory and idea to idea very rapidly. From Barry White to the color white to milk to the Milky Way is a long voyage conceptually, but a short jaunt neurologically.

Indexes were a major advance because they allowed books to be accessed in the nonlinear way we access our internal memories. They helped turn the book into something like a modern CD, where you can skip directly to the track you want, as compared to unindexed books, which, like cassette tapes, force you to troll laboriously through large swaths of material in order to find the bit you’re looking for. Along with page numbers and tables of contents, the index changed what a book was, and what it could do for scholars. The historian Ivan Illich has argued that this represented an invention of such magnitude that “it seems reasonable to speak of the pre- and post-index Middle Ages.” As books became easier and easier to consult, the imperative to hold their contents in memory became less and less relevant, and the very notion of what it meant to be erudite began to evolve from possessing information internally to knowing where to find information in the labyrinthine world of external memory.

To our
memory-bound predecessors, the goal of training one’s memory was not to become a “living book,” but rather a “living concordance,” a walking index of everything one had read, and all the information one had acquired. It was about more than merely possessing an internal library of facts, quotes, and ideas; it was about building an organizational scheme for accessing them. Consider, for example, Peter of Ravenna, a leading fifteenth-century Italian jurist (also, one gets the impression, one of the fifteenth century’s leading self-promoters) who authored one of the era’s most successful books on memory training. Titled
Phoenix
, it was translated into several languages and reprinted all across Europe. It was just the most famous of a handful of memory treatises created from the thirteenth century onward that helped make memory techniques that had long been the exclusive purview of scholars and monks available to a wider audience of doctors, lawyers, tradesmen, and everyday folks who just wanted to remember stuff. One finds books from the period on every variety of mnemonic subject, including how to use the art of memory in gambling, how to use it to keep track of debts, how to memorize the contents of ships, how to remember the names of acquaintances, and how to memorize playing cards. Peter, for his part, bragged of having memorized twenty thousand legal points, a thousand texts by Ovid, two hundred of Cicero’s speeches and sayings, three hundred sayings of philosophers, seven thousand texts from Scripture, as well as a host of other classical works.

For leisure, he would reread books cached away in his many memory palaces. “When I left my country to visit as a pilgrim the cities of Italy, I can truly say I carried everything I owned with me,” he wrote. To store all those images, Peter started with a hundred thousand loci, but he was always picking up new memory palaces on his travels across Europe. He constructed a mental library of sources and quotations on every important subject, classified alphabetically. He boasts, for example, that filed away in his brain under the letter A were sources on the subjects “
de alimentis, de alienatione, de absentia, de arbitris, de appellationibus, et de similibus quae jure nostro habentur incipientibus in dicta littera A
”—“about provisions, about foreign property, about absence, about judges, about appeals, and about similar matters in our law which begin with the letter A.” Each piece of knowledge was assigned a specific address. When he wished to expound on a given topic, he simply reached into the proper chamber of the proper memory palace and pulled out the proper source.

When the point of reading is, as it was for Peter of Ravenna, remembering, you approach a text very differently than most of us do today. Now we put a premium on reading quickly and widely, and that breeds a kind of superficiality in our reading, and in what we seek to get out of books. You can’t read a page a minute, the rate at which you’re probably reading this book, and expect to remember what you’ve read for any considerable length of time. If something is going to be made memorable, it has to be dwelled upon, repeated.

In his essay “The First Steps Toward a History of Reading,” Robert Darnton describes a switch from “intensive” to “extensive” reading that occurred as books began to proliferate. Until relatively recently, people read “intensively,” says Darnton. “They had only a few books—the Bible, an almanac, a devotional work or two—and they read them over and over again, usually aloud and in groups, so that a narrow range of traditional literature became deeply impressed on their consciousness.”

But after the printing press appeared around 1440, things began gradually to change. In the first century after Gutenberg, the number of books in existence increased fourteenfold. It became possible, for the first time, for people without great wealth to have a small library in their own homes, and a trove of easily consulted external memories close at hand.

Today, we read books “extensively,” without much in the way of sustained focus, and, with rare exceptions, we read each book only once. We value quantity of reading over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture. Even in the most highly specialized fields, it can be a Sisyphean task to try to stay on top of the ever-growing mountain of words loosed upon the world each day.

Few of us make any serious effort to remember what we read. When I read a book, what do I hope will stay with me a year later? If it’s a work of nonfiction, the thesis, maybe, if the book has one. A few savory details, perhaps. If it’s fiction, the broadest outline of the plot, something about the main characters (at least their names), and an overall critical judgment about the book. Even these are likely to fade. Looking up at my shelves, at the books that have drained so many of my waking hours, is always a dispiriting experience.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
: I remember magical realism and that I enjoyed it. But that’s about it. I don’t even recall when I read it. About
Wuthering Heights
I remember exactly two things: that I read it in a high school English class and that there was a character named Heathcliff. I couldn’t say whether I liked the book or not.

I don’t think I’m an exceptionally bad reader. I suspect that many people, maybe even most, are like me. We read and read and read, and we forget and forget and forget. So why do we bother? Michel de Montaigne expressed the dilemma of extensive reading in the sixteenth century: “I leaf through books, I do not study them,” he wrote. “What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else’s. It is only the material from which my judgment has profited, and the thoughts and ideas with which it has become imbued; the author, the place, the words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget.” He goes on to explain how “to compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory,” he adopted the habit of writing in the back of every book a short critical judgment, so as to have at least some general idea of what the tome was about and what he thought of it.

You might think that
the advent of printing, and the ability to more easily offload memories from brains onto paper, would have immediately rendered the old memory techniques irrelevant. But that’s not what happened. At least not right away. In fact, paradoxically, at exactly the moment when a neat rendering of history would suggest that the art of memory should have been on its way to obsolescence, it underwent its greatest renaissance.

Ever since Simonides, the art of memory had been about creating architectural spaces in the imagination. But in the sixteenth century, an Italian philosopher and alchemist named Giulio Camillo—known as “Divine Camillo” to his many admirers and “the Quack” to his many detractors—had the clever idea of making concrete what had for the previous two thousand years always been an ethereal idea. It occurred to him that the system would work a whole lot better if someone transformed the metaphor of the memory palace into a real wooden building. He imagined creating a “Theater of Memory” that would serve as a universal library containing all the knowledge of mankind. It may sound like the premise of a Borges story, but it was a very real project, with very real backers, and it made Camillo into one of the most famous men in all of Europe. King Francis I of France made Camillo promise that the secrets of his theater would never be revealed to anyone but him, and invested five hundred ducats toward its completion.

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.”

That was a grand claim, and with hindsight, sure, it sounds like hocus-pocus. But Camillo was convinced that there existed a set of magical symbols that could organically represent the entire cosmos. Just as the image of the she-male represented the concept of e-mailing in that first memory palace I built to house Ed’s to-do list, Camillo believed there were images that could encapsulate vast and powerful concepts about the universe, and simply by memorizing those images, one would be able understand the hidden connections underlying everything.

A scale wooden model of Camillo’s theater was exhibited in Venice and Paris, and hundreds—perhaps thousands—of cards were drafted to fill the theater’s boxes and drawers. The artists Titian and Salviati were enlisted to paint the theater’s symbolic imagery. However, that seems to be about as far as things got. The theater was never actually completed, and all that remains of the grand scheme is a short, posthumously published manifesto,
The Idea of the Theater
, dictated on his deathbed over the course of a week. Written in the future tense without any images or diagrams, it is, to put it mildly, a confusing book.

Though history had largely forgotten the man who promised the ultimate technology for remembering—“divine” lost out to “quack” in almost every assessment—Camillo’s reputation was resurrected in the twentieth century thanks to the efforts of the historian Frances Yates, who helped reconstruct the theater’s blueprints in her book
The Art of Memory
, and the Italian literature professor Lina Bolzoni, who has helped explain how Camillo’s theater was more than just the work of a nut job, but actually the apotheosis of an entire era’s ideas about memory.

The Renaissance, with its fresh translations of ancient Greek texts, brought about a renewed fascination with Plato’s old idea that there is a transcendental ideal reality of which our own world is but a pale shadow. In Camillo’s Neoplatonic vision of the universe, images in the mind were a way of accessing that ideal realm, and the art of memory was a secret key to unlocking the occult structure of the universe. Memory was transformed from a tool of rhetoric, as it had been for the ancients, or an instrument of pious meditation, as it had been for the medieval scholastic philosophers, into a purely mystical art.