Moonwalking With Einstein (31 page)

126
gathering armies, heroic shields, challenges between rivals:
Ong,
Orality and Literacy
, p. 23, and Lord,
The Singer of Tales
, pp. 68-98.

126
that was about as far as his inquiry into the matter went:
As it turns out, this radical argument was actually not new at all. In fact, it seems long ago to have been a widely accepted notion that was somehow forgotten. The first century A.D. Jewish historian Josephus wrote, “They say that even Homer did not leave his poetry in writing, but that it was transmitted by memory.” And according to a tradition repeated by Cicero, the first official redaction of Homer was ordered by the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus in the sixth century B.C. As people’s connections to oral culture grew more distant over the centuries, the idea of literature without writing became a harder and harder notion to digest, and eventually just came to seem implausible.

127
“composed wholly without the aid of writing”:
For more, see Ong,
Orality and Literacy
, which is a major source for this chapter.

129
“Word for word, and line for line”:
As reported by Parry’s student Albert Lord in
The Singer of Tales
, p. 27.

130
before trying to see it as a series of images:
Carruthers argues in a revised second edition of
The Book of Memory
that the
memoria verborum
has long been misunderstood by modern psychologists and scholars. It was not, in fact, an alternative to rote, verbatim memorization, she contends, and was never meant to be used for memorizing long stretches of text. Rather, she suggests, it was for recalling single words and phrases—perhaps as long as a line of verse—that one had trouble remembering accurately.

131
the quandary of how to see the unseeable:
According to Pliny, it was Simonides who invented the art of memory but Metrodorus who perfected it. Cicero called the man “almost divine.”

132
balistarius
:
Alternatively, Bradwardine’s system allowed that you could reverse a syllable simply by imagining an image upside-down, so “ba-” could also just be an abbot hanging from the ceiling.

132
an abbot getting shot by a crossbow:
Or an abbot having a conversation with another abbot who was hanging from the ceiling.

132
“mangles or caresses St. Dominic”:
Carruthers,
The Book of Memory
, pp. 136-37.

132
depraved carnal affections:
Yates,
The Art of Memory,
p. 277.

7: THE END OF REMEMBERING

139
that we have any knowledge of it today:
Manguel,
A History of Reading
, p. 60.

139
a time when writing was ascendant in Greece:
In Socrates’ day, about 10 percent of the Greek world was literate.

140
“in material books to help the memory”:
Carruthers,
The Book of Memory
, p. 8.

140
some stretching up to sixty feet:
Fischer,
A History of Writing
, p. 128.

140
papyrus reeds imported from the Nile Delta:
Papyrus, the literal bulrushes of the biblical “ark of bulrushes” that carried the baby Moses, was also called
byblos
, after the Phoenician port of Byblos where it was exported—hence the “Bible.” In the second century B.C., the Hellenistic ruler of Egypt, Ptolemy V Epiphanes, cut off papyrus exports in order to curtail the growth of a rival library at Pergamum in Asia Minor (the word “parchment”—derived from
charta pergamena
—is a tribute to Pergamum, where the material was used extensively). From then on, it became more common for books to be penned on stretched parchment or vellum (a final piece of ancient book etymology: vellum, which was often made from calfskin, shares the same root with “veal”), both of which lasted longer and were more transportable than papyrus.

140
how long to pause between sentences:
He created the high point,
^·
, corresponding to the modern period, the low point, · , corresponding to the modern comma, and the middle point, · , a pause of intermediate length, which is probably closest to the modern semicolon. The middle point vanished in the Middle Ages. The question mark didn’t appear until the publication of Sir Philip Sydney’s
Arcadia
in 1587, and the exclamation mark was first used in the Catechism of Edward VI in 1553.

141
GREECE:
Small,
Wax Tablets of the Mind
, p. 53. I’ve borrowed her idea of printing English in this manner to show how hard it is to read.

141
a phrase often repeated in medieval texts:
For more on reading
scriptio continua
, see Manguel,
A History of Reading
, p. 47.

142
extremely difficult to sight-read:
Indeed, much published modern Hebrew, like the kind you’d find in a newspaper in Tel Aviv, is written without vowels. Words generally have to be recognized as units, rather than sounded out as they are in English. This slows Hebrew readers down. Native Hebrew speakers who also read English can typically read English translations faster than their own native language, even though it takes about 40 percent more words to say the same thing in English as in Hebrew.

143
“The stuff he knows made him lick her”:
Sounds that can be sliced up in different ways to yield different semantic meanings are known as oronyms. The “stuffy nose” comes from Pinker,
The Language Instinct
, p. 160.

143
a giant and very curious step backward:
Small,
Wax Tablets of the Mind
, p. 114.

143
ánagignósko
:
Carruthers,
The Book of Memory
, p. 30.

143
ten billion volumes:
Man,
Gutenberg: How One Man Remade the World
, p. 4.

143
would have been considered particularly well stocked:
In 1290, the library at the Sorbonne, among the biggest in the world, held exactly 1,017 books—fewer titles than many readers of this book will devour in a lifetime.

144
hadn’t even been invented yet:
For more on the history of the display of books, see Petroski,
The Book on the Bookshelf
, pp. 40-42.

144
still weighed more than ten pounds:
Illich,
In the Vineyard of the Text
, p. 112.

144
around the same time that chapter divisions were introduced:
The Comprehensive Concordance to the Holy Scriptures
(1894), pp. 8-9.

144
reading the text all the way through:
Draaisma,
Metaphors of Memory
, p. 34.

145
“pre- and post-index Middle Ages”:
Illich,
In the Vineyard of the Text
, p. 103.

145
labyrinthine world of external memory:
A point made by Draaisma in
Metaphors of Memory.

146
“living concordance”:
In the words of Carruthers,
The Craft of Thought
, p. 31.

146
how to memorize playing cards:
Corsi,
The Enchanted Loom
, p. 21.

147
“the letter A”:
Translation quoted from Carruthers,
The Book of Memory
, p. 114.

147
“intensive” to “extensive” reading:
Darnton attributes this idea to Rolf Engelsing, who cites the transformation as happening as late as the eighteenth century.
The Kiss of Lamourette
, p. 165.

149
one of the most famous men in all of Europe:
Yates’s assessment in
The Art of Memory
, p. 129.

149
round, seven-tiered edifice:
Yates tried to reconstruct the blueprints for the theater in
The Art of Memory
.

150
“and all the things that are in the entire world”:
Rossi,
Logic and the Art of Memory
, p. 74.

150
hundreds—perhaps thousands—of cards were drafted:
Corsi,
The Enchanted Loom
, p. 23.

150
over the course of a week:
Much of this information comes from Douglas Radcliff-Ulmstead (1972), “Giulio Camillo’s Emblems of Memory,”
Yale French Studies
47, 47-56.

151
the apotheosis of an entire era’s ideas about memory:
More recently, virtual reality gurus have come to see Camillo’s memory theater as the historical forerunner of their entire field—and have traced its influence all the way to the Internet (the ultimate universal memory palace) and the Apple and Windows operating systems, whose spatially arranged folders and icons are just a modern reworking of Camillo’s mnemonic principles. See Peter Matussek (2001), “The Renaissance of the Theater of Memory,”
Janus
8
Paragrana
10, 66-70.

152
“riding a sea monster”:
These translations are from Rowland,
Giordano Bruno
, pp. 123-24.

152
“a parrot on his head”:
Eco,
The Search for the Perfect Language
, p.138.

153
nine pairs of cranial nerves:
There are now twelve known pairs of cranial nerves.

153
almost a half million dollars:
Fellows and Larrowe,
Loisette Exposed
, p. 217.

154
a memory course lasting several weeks:
Walsh and Zlatic (1981), “Mark Twain and the Art of Memory,”
American Literature
53, no. 2, 214-31.

8: THE OK PLATEAU

164
Johann Winkelmann:
The German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz also wrote about a similar system in the seventeenth century, but it’s quite likely that the idea of making numbers more memorable by turning them into words was discovered much earlier. The Greeks had an acrophonic system, wherein the first letter of each numeral could be used to represent the number, so that, for example, P represented the number five, for
penta
. In Hebrew, each letter of the
aleph bet
corresponds to a number, a quirk that Kabbalists have used to seek out hidden numerical meanings in Scripture. Nobody knows whether these systems were ever used to memorize numbers, but it’s hard to imagine that some Mediterranean businessman who had to do mental accounting wouldn’t have stumbled onto such an obvious idea.

166
advance the sport of competitive memory by a quantum leap:
Ed gave me the following example of his Millennium PAO system at work: “The number 115 is Psmith, the stylish character from the P. G. Wodehouse books (the P is silent, by the way, as in ‘phthisis’ or ‘ptarmigan’). His action is that he gives away an umbrella that doesn’t belong to him to a delicate young lady he sees stranded in a rainstorm. The number 614 is Bill Clinton, who smokes but does not inhale marijuana, and the number 227 is Kurt Gödel, the obsessive logician, who starved himself to death by accident because he was too busy doing formal logic. Now, I can combine these three numbers to form nine-digit numbers that have anecdotal coherence. For example, 115,614,227 becomes Psmith deigning to puff at—without going so far as to inhale—formal logic. Now this is quite understandable since logic is, after all, an activity unsuited to the true English gent. If you change the ordering of the numbers, you get a different anecdote. The number 614,227,115 becomes Bill Clinton mortally forgetting to eat because he’s too busy pinching umbrellas for pretty young girls. This image will interact with my pre-existing knowledge of Clinton’s life—seeing as how he has gotten into trouble before with the inappropriate handling of cylindrical objects for young ladies—and the chance activation of this association, and the glimmer of accompanying humor, serves to better the stability of the memory. See, each possible combination has its own dynamic feel and emotion, and very often, interestingly, this will be the first thing in recall to pop into one’s head, before the other details slowly shuffle into view. I might also mention that this works as an excellent idea-generator and constitutes sound afternoon entertainment.”