Let me ask you something:
If you had the cure for cancer, to what lengths would you go to get it into the hands of the people?
I'm guessing you would not rest until you could see the world freed from the disease in all its manifestations.
Matteo Ricci did not have the cure for cancer, but as we learn in The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci by Jonathan D. Spence he did have the next best thing: A simple recipe for eliminating forgetfulness.
Not only that, but Ricci's recipe helps with memorizing entire books and large volumes of vocabulary. Most impressively, Ricci developed a means for memorizing how to write in Chinese.
Yes, you really can memorize how to understand and sound those crazy characters, and even memorize the stroke order.
The Freakish Willpower Of A Memory Wizard
As an Italian Jesuit priest and missionary, Ricci's memory techniques were so powerful that some of the people in China who heard him recite their books forward and backward thought he was a wizard. In some cases, people saw him as a religious threat because Ricci also believed he had the ultimate salve for the human condition: Christianity.
Indeed, as Jonathan D. Spence suggests in The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, "by impressing the Chinese with his memory skills, Ricci hoped to interest them in his culture; through interesting them in his culture he hoped to draw them to an interest in God."
Talk About Ambition!
Although Ricci's proselytization had only middling results in China, he was a friend of memory techniques, and we can learn a lot from him about how to use mnemonics at a much higher level.
He wrote about his approach to memory and quoted the scholars from whom he learned the Memory Palace technique in a book called Xiguo Jifa. It took me forever and a day to find a copy of it, but finally I did and made sure to pack it up and take it with me during a recent move:
Speaking of books, Ricci was said to have the ability to memorize them cover to cover – and recite them forward and backwards.
But is this a useful skill? You be the judge.
But memorizing entire books aside, as with all interesting lives, Ricci's was filled with drama. Along with his many thrills, chills and spills, this "wizard" of the dark mnemonic arts we can learn …
The Many Dangers Of Using Memory Techniques
The first danger with using memory techniques is that as your memory grows stronger, so do your powers. You may even find that special new powers grow, abilities that you did not anticipate.
And, as all fans of Spider-Man know …
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
This is certainly true, but those of us living today can probably ignore the idea that using mnemonics fuses your brain with the cosmos. But it was a common concern in the sixteenth century, the flames of which Giordano Bruno had no problem fanning.
But for Ricci's contemporaries, the threat was real. Being accused of magical powers regularly led to imprisonment, disfiguring torture and public execution. Often all three.
We can also probably dismiss the idea that rosemary helps with memory improvement, something promised by Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet: "There's rosemary, that's for remembrance, pray you, love, remember."
Other than that, the rest is golden. Drawing on
Published on 10 years ago
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