Today, a memory palace in an odd place and the
wrong time. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
Historian Jonathan Spence
picks a strange perspective from which to tell the
story of Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci. Ricci went
to China in 1582 and spent the remaining 32 years
of his life there. The Jesuits were only a
generation old when Ricci joined them. They'd been
formed in answer to the Protestant Reformation, and
they offered an energetic and intellectual response
to everything that'd gone bad in the late medieval
church.
Ricci brought blazing intelligence to the task of
learning who the Chinese were and how to bring
Christianity to them. He learned their language,
technology, and culture.
Then, in 1596, Ricci wrote A Treatise on
Mnemonics, in Chinese, for the governor of
Jiangxi Province. In it he recreated the medieval
European idea of a memory palace -- an edifice you
build in your mind and furnish with mnemonic
devices. Recollection is a process of walking
through the rooms and associating information with
their contents. Those contents must be distinct and
dramatic.
Suppose a modern medical student were to build a
memory palace. In one room he might put a Mountie
on his horse, leading a manacled prisoner. That
triggers the phrase, Some Criminals Have
Underestimated Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The
first letters of each word, S, C, H, U, R, C, M,
and P, identify the shoulder and arm bones -- S for
scapula, C for clavicle, Humerus, Ulna, Radius, and
so on. He can fill his whole building with bizarre
people and things to aid his memory of bones,
muscles, and nerves.
The memory palace idea was important before we had
millions of the new printed books -- when most
knowledge had to be carried by rote. But printed
books were driving out the art of memory and they
were bringing in the Reformation. Now we could
write it down, forget it, and look it up when we
needed it.
Ricci may've been bringing modern reform to the
Catholic Church, but he was also leading the
Chinese back to the interior life of the medieval
church, a world where the mind was supposed to
operate with minimal instruction from outside
influence. By now, Ricci's flamboyant tricks of
memory were falling from favor. Europe was
condemning them as magic and showmanship. But this
was China.
So Ricci did something we might take to heart today
as we buy into our computers -- our second selves,
our replacement brains. For they too take us
further and further from the old discipline of
memory. Why memorize what we can look up? And so
our inner life is gradually impoverished for lack
of grist.
Ricci left his mark on China. He didn't accomplish
widespread conversions, of course. But his mission
did forge the first solid intellectual link between
Europe and this very different culture. Part of it
was a matter of calling forth an old ability that
waned during the Renaissance -- and which we are
absolutely fleeing from today.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
