The Memory Chalet - By Tony Judt Page 0,2

in cozy central European villages began to play a more practical role. I had long been fascinated by the mnemonic devices employed by early-modern thinkers and travelers to store and recall detail and description: these are beautifully depicted in the Renaissance essays of Frances Yates—and more recently in Jonathan Spence’s account of an Italian traveler to medieval China, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci.

Such would-be memorizers did not build mere hostelries or residences in which to house their knowledge: they built palaces. However, I had no desire to construct palaces in my head. The real thing had always struck me as somehow indulgent: from Wolsey’s Hampton Court to Louis XIV’s Versailles, such extravagances were always intended to impress rather than to serve. I could no more have imagined in my still and silent nights such a memory palace than I could have sewn myself a star-spangled suit of pantaloon and vest. But if not a memory palace, why not a memory chalet?

The advantage of a chalet lay not only in the fact that I could envisage it in very considerable and realistic detail—from the snow rail by the doorstep to the inner window keeping the Valaison winds at bay—but that it was a place I would want to visit again and again. In order for a memory palace to work as a storehouse of infinitely reorganized and regrouped recollections, it needs to be a building of extraordinary appeal, if only for one person. Each night, for days, weeks, months, and now well over a year, I have returned to that chalet. I have passed through its familiar short corridors with their worn stone steps and settled into one of two or perhaps three armchairs—conveniently unoccupied by others. And thence, the wish fathering the thought with reasonably unerring reliability, I have conjured up, sorted out, and ordered a story or an argument or an example that I plan to use in something I shall write the following day.

What then? Here is where the chalet transforms itself from a mnemonic trigger to a storage device. Once I know roughly what I want to say and a sequence in which it is best said, I leave the armchair and go back to the door of the chalet itself. From here I retrace my steps, usually from the first storage closet—for skis, let’s say—toward ever more substantial spaces: the bar, the dining room, the lounge, the old-fashioned wooden key rack pinned under the cuckoo clock, the rather random collection of books straggling up the back staircase, and thence to one of any number of bedrooms. To each of these locations has been assigned a staging point in a narrative, say, or perhaps an illustrative example.

The system is far from perfect. Overlaps persist, and I have to be sure that with each new tale a significantly different route map must be established lest it be confused with similar features of a recent predecessor. Thus, first impressions notwithstanding, it is not prudent to associate all matters of nutrition with one room, of seduction or sex with another, of intellectual exchange with a third. Better to rely on micro-geography (this drawer follows that closet on that wall) than to trust in the logic of the conventional mental furniture on which we depend.

I am struck by the frequency with which people comment on the perceived difficulty inherent in arranging one’s thoughts spatially in order to be able to retrieve them a few hours later. I, admittedly from within the unusual constraints of my physical imprisonment, have come to see this as the easiest of devices—almost too mechanical, inviting me as it does to arrange examples and sequences and paradoxes in tidy ways which may misleadingly reorder the original and far more suggestive confusion of impressions and recollections.

I wonder whether it doesn’t help to be male: the conventional sort of male who is on the average better at parking cars and recalling spatial arrangements than the conventional kind of woman who does better on tests requiring recollection of persons and impressions? As a child I had a bit of a party piece which consisted of map-reading a car through a strange city whose configurations I had only ever studied once, and that briefly. Conversely, I was and remain useless at the first requirement of the ambitious politician: the capacity to navigate a dinner party, recalling the domestic arrangements and political prejudices of all present before bidding them farewell by first name. There must be a mnemonic device for this