The Art of Memory When we can traverse the plains of memory, stopping at each fire to warm ourselves before we start again on our journey, there is a world inside a world that keeps going on to infinity. If we are lucky enough to hear the eternal melody that is at work in these moments, many fine hours may come upon us. But sometimes the solace and hospitality are too much and we live with our new found companions, taking them along wherever we go, as a shadow upon our eyes. The memories of Thoreau, or the early frontier narratives of Indian captivity, are something that I have felt eternal and unchangeable in human nature, not for any piece of information they have given me, but because my melancholy has always found peace in their environment. For some the world is old or the world is new, but the point is that we tend to look at it through memory. One memorable event confounds all future celebrations; we remember so as not to forget, but we do not remember that we are able t
May 13th, 2013 The sickness and disease with which our constitutions must struggle have, I believe, given rise to those phantoms and evil spirits that we have conjured to exist and have empire over our actions. A slow analysis of the mind will show us that with the oncoming of a cold our mood will shift and our opinions change, so that we may freely believe ourselves possessed, whether it be of a physical or mental state. For our definitions and portrayals of these spirits work in conjunction with our modern-day microbes, and that there are good and bad microbes our medicinal science will fully attest. Thus that spirits exist I could most certainly believe, for the name has become something other than what we know it by today: our term lends more to our scientific mind than our Christian or folkloric mythology would have us think. But I have heard it said as well that everything animate and inanimate has a soul, knowing that our perception is merely the false eye with which