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wrote in
The Idler.
"The true art of memory is the art of attention." This observation is vividly illustrated in the life of the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci, who traveled and proselytized in China in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He is known to Sinologists as the man who drew the first map of the world for the Chinese, and in so doing conveyed many facts disturbing to the Ming court: that China might not be the Middle Kingdom, that other large countries exist on the planet, and that the earth is round.
    Ricci developed a highly complex mnemonic system, which served him well as a missionary (he carried a whole library of Christian theology in his head) and as a linguist (he became so skillful in the language that he wrote a number of books in Chinese). His memory also endeared him to the Chinese and won him Christian converts. In his study of the man and his times,
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci,
Jonathan Spence described how "Ricci wrote quite casually in 1595 of running through a list of four to five hundred random Chinese ideograms and then repeating the list in reverse order."
    The memory palace that Ricci advocated was an imaginary mental structure that might be based on a real building. This construction, great or small, was the best repository for knowledge. It could be vast, full of rooms and halls, corridors, and pavilions, and in each chamber we could place the images of things we wanted to recall. Ricci wrote, "To everything that we wish to remember we should give an image; and to every one of these images we should assign a position where it can repose peacefully until we are ready to claim it by an act of memory."
    The scholar Francesco Panigarola, who may have taught Ricci in Italy, and who wrote on memory arts, could remember as many as 100,000 images at a time. And as a Jesuit, Ricci was well aware of the importance Ignatius of Loyola attached, in his
Spiritual Exercises,
to memory as a means of contemplation. Ricci himself credited the concept of the memory palace to a Greek poet of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. , Simonides of Ceos. But the arts of memory were a part of classical learning, and in listing the memory experts of the past, Pliny's
Natural History
was as powerful an inspiration to Ricci as it was to Jorge Luis Borges four hundred years later—the result in Borges's case was his wonderful story "Funes the Memorious."
    Ireneo Funes, the hero, has a marvelous memory, and one day the narrator loans him a copy of Pliny. Later, he visits Funes, who begins by reciting the book by heart—in the darkness of his room.
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...enumerating, in Latin and in Spanish, the cases of prodigious memory recorded in the
Naturalis historia:
Cyrus, king of the Persians, who could call every soldier in his armies by name; Mithridates Eupator, who administered the law in twenty-two languages of his empire; Simonides, inventor of the science of mnemonics; Metrodorus, who practiced the art of faithfully repeating what he had heard only once.
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    But Funes is unimpressed by any of this. His own memory is as good but much stranger, for after a fall from a horse he became paralyzed, and in waking from the trauma of the fall he discovered he had the gift of an instantly imagistic memory:
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He knew by heart the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on 30 April 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had seen only once.... Two or three times, he had reconstructed a whole day; he never hesitated, but each reconstruction required a whole day. He told me: "I alone have more memories than all mankind has probably had since the world has been the world.... My memory is like a garbage heap."
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    Borges describes one of Funes's bizarre projects, how he has invented an original system for numbering, giving every number "a particular sign, a kind of mark." The number one might be
the gas,
two might be
the cauldron,
and so on:
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in