Little, Big

hearing, down the hall, Sylvie pass George on her way up; he heard them greet each other in a volley of wisecracks and kisses.

IV.

It often happens that a man cannot recall at the moment, but can search for what he wants and find it… For this reason some use places for the purposes of recollecting. The reason for this is that men pass rapidly from one step to the next: for instance from milk to white, from white to air, from air to damp; after which one recollects autumn, supposing that one is trying to recollect that season.

—Aristotle, De anima

Ariel Hawksquill, greatest mage of this age of the world (and a match, she was not too modest to think, of many great ones of the so-called past, with whom she now and then discoursed), possessed no crystal ball; judicial astrology she knew to be a fraud, though she had uses for the old pictured heavens; she disdained spells and geomancies of all kinds, except at great need, and the sleeping dead and their secrets she let sleep. Her one Great Art, and it was all she needed, was the highest Art of all, and required no vulgar tools, no Book, no Wand, no Word. It could be practiced (as, on a certain rainy afternoon of the winter in which Auberon came to Old Law Farm, she was practicing it) before the fire, with feet up, and tea and toast at hand. It required nothing but the interior of her skull: that and a concentration and an acceptance of impossibility which saints would have found admirable and chess masters difficult.

The Art of Memory, as it is described by ancient writers, is a method by which the Natural Memory we are born with can be improved tremendously, beyond recognition in fact. The ancients agreed that vivid pictures in a strict order were the most easily remembered. Therefore, in order to construct an Artificial Memory of great power, the first step (Quintillian and other authorities agree on this, though they diverge at other points) is to choose a Place: a temple, for instance, or a city street of shops and doorways, or the interior of a house—any place that has parts which occur in a regular order. This Place is committed to memory carefully and well, so well that the rememberer can scurry around it backwards, forwards, any which way at will. The next step is to create vivid symbols or images for the things one wishes to remember—the more shocking and highly-colored the better, according to the experts: a ravished nun, say, for the idea of Sacrilege, or a cloaked figure with a bomb for Revolution. These symbols are then cast onto the various parts of the memory Place, its doors, niches, forecourts, windows, closets, and other spaces; and then the rememberer has simply to go around his memory Place, in any order he wishes, and take from each spot the Thing which symbolizes the Notion which he wishes to remember. The more one wishes to remember, of course, the larger the house of memory must be; it usually ceases to be an actual place, as actual places tend to be too plain and incommodious, and becomes an imaginary place, as large and varied as the rememberer can make it. Wings can be added at will (and with practice); architectural styles can vary with the subject-matter they are meant to contain. There were even refinements of the system whereby not Notions but actual words were to be remembered by complex symbols, and finally individual letters: so that a collection of sickle, millstone, and hacksaw instantly brings the word God to mind when gathered from the appropriate mental nook. The whole process was immensely complicated and tedious and was for the most part rendered obsolete by the invention of the filing-cabinet.

The Art of Memory

But the greatest practitioners of the old art discovered some odd things about their memory houses the longer they lived in them, and modern practitioners (or practitioner, really, there being only one of any skill, and she keeps it to herself) have improved on and even further complicated the system for reasons of their own.

It was discovered, for instance, that the symbolic figures with vivid expressions, once installed in their proper places, are subject to subtle change as they stand waiting to be called forth. That ravished nun who meant Sacrilege might, when one passes her again, have acquired a depraved air about the mouth and eyes one hadn’t thought he had bestowed on her, and something wanton about her deshabille that looks Somehow purposeful rather than forced: and Sacrilege changes to Hypocrisy, or at least borrows some of its aspects, and thus the memory she symbolizes alters perhaps in instructive ways. Also: as a memory house grows, it makes conjunctions and vistas that its builder can’t conceive of beforehand. When out of necessity he throws up a new wing, it must abut the original place in some way; so a door in the original house that previously opened on a weedy garden might suddenly blow open in a draught and show its astonished owner his grand new gallery full of just-installed memories from the backside, so to speak, at a left-hand turning, facing in the wrong direction—also instructive; and that new gallery might also turn out to be a shortcut to the ice-house where he had put a distant winter once and then forgot.

Yes, forgot: because another thing about a memory house is that its builder and occupier can lose things in it just as you can in any house—the ball of string which you were certain you kept either with the stamps and the tape in the desk-drawer or in the hall closet with the tackhammer and the picture-wire, but which isn’t in either place when you go to look for it. In the ordinary or Natural Memory such things can simply vanish; you don’t even remember you forgot them. The advantage of a memory house is that you know it’s in there somewhere.

So it was that Ariel Hawksquill was rooting around in one of the oldest attics of her memory mansions, looking for something she had forgotten but knew was there.

She had been re-reading an ars memorativa of Giordano Bruno’s called De umbris idearum, a huge treatise on symbols and seals and signs to be used in the highest forms of the art. Her first-edition copy had marginal notes in a neat Italic hand, often illuminating but more often puzzling. On a page where Bruno treats of the various orders of symbols one might use for various purposes, the commentator had noted: “As in ye cartes of ye returne of R.C. are iiiij Personnes, Places, Thynges &c., which emblemes or cartes are for remembering or foretelling, and discoverie of smalle worldes.” Now this “R.C.” could stand for “Roman Church”, or—just possibly— “Rosicrucian.” But it was the persons and places and things that had rung a distant bell: a bell here, she thought, where she had stored her distant childhood long ago.

She moved carefully but with increasing impatience through the miscellany there, her dog Spark, a trip to Rockaway, her first kiss; she became intrigued with the contents of chests and went off down useless corridors of reminiscence. In one place she had put a battered cowbell, why she at first had no idea. Then she rang it tentatively. It was the bell she had heard, and instantly she remembered her grandfather (whom the cowbell was —of course !—to represent, since he had been a farm laborer in England till he emigrated to this vast and cowless city). She saw him distinctly now, where she had put him, below the mantel with the Toby jugs on it which resembled him, in a battered armchair; he turned the cowbell in his hands as he had used to turn his pipe.

“Did you,” she questioned him, “tell me once about cards, with persons and places and things?”

“I might have.”

“In what connection?”

Silence. “Well, small worlds then.”

It grew clearer in that attic, lit with a past sun, and she sat at Grandpa’s feet in the old apartment. “It was the only thing I ever found had any value, like,” he said, “and I threw it away on a silly girl. Would’ve brought twenty bob in any dealer’s, I can tell you that, they were that old and fine. I found them in an old cottage that the squire wanted pulled down. And she was a girl who said she saw fairies and pixies and such, and her father was another like her. Violet her name was. And I said, ‘Tell my fortune then with these if you can.’ And she like riffled through them—there were pictures on them of persons and places and things—and she laughed and said I’d die a lonely old man on a fourth storey. And wouldn’t give me back the cards I’d found.”

There it was then. She put the cowbell back in its place in the order of her childhood (put it next to a well-