In these quiet moments, in these ancient places . . .

The mind is a miraculous thing. The playground of invention and the laboratory of creativity, the throne of wisdom–if one’s fortunate enough–and yes, the mind houses most of what comprises our whole sense of self, of identity. It is also the storehouse for that matchless tool and gift: memory. There’s the deeply buried sort of memory that is expressed mainly as those autonomic controls and intuitive responses that keep our complex biological machinery running as well as possible at all times, waking and sleeping. There’s that incredibly purposeful (but often tiresome to develop) form of memory that we’re required to hone by the hard work and repetition of study and learning. Indeed, those labors that make most of us crotchety about going to school despite our greatest yearning for the reward of that new-fixed memory and our deepest hopes that it will last.

There’s the sort of memory that transcends individuality and lingers in those places where it came to be. I love to visit others’ memories not just vicariously as they tell tales or teach me of the past but, most especially, when I can take them in through membranes of the spirit, thus: touching an antique piece of furniture and feeling in its burnished grain the passage of every hand that came before my hand; standing in the stained-glass filtered sunlight pouring through a venerable space and feeling the ghosts of history sifting down on me like glittering atomic dust. Most deeply, when I can stand in the places of the ancients knowing in my bones that I connect this way to every one that’s passed before.

And there’s the beautiful, elusive and elastic sort of memory that has the most affinity with creativity and invention and play. It’s the place where the method of loci, or the building of memory palaces, enables those mental competitors that enter memory championships, to erect storage for their knowledge in structures that to ordinary persons might seem astounding and nearly unimaginable in their detail and delicacy and, at the same time, strength. It’s the wonderful seat of those marvelous incidental and accidental memory palaces that despite our lack of practice and training we non-competitors manage to build where our fearful or fondly held sentiments and reminiscences and remembrance of things past can hallow our haunt our dreams, with or without requiring tea-soaked madeleines.

These are the palaces whose halls I wander when in search of things I fear I’ve lost, timidly though I may tread. They are the temples where I look for long-ago learned wisdom, past moments of renewal and respite, and lessons learned that lead me hopefully into the days to come. Most of all, my stately edifice is built to offer shelter to those most treasured of my memories, the parts of the past I want to revisit not from need or for desperation at things I’ve thought destroyed, but for the purest joy and pleasure of basking in their wonders not just on the day when they and I first met, but over and over and over again. That, for me, is the sweetest of those royal gifts bestowed on me whenever I am fortunate to enter in the palaces of memory.