Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder Read Online Free PDF

researcher—in fact
revitalized
the whole field. He’d generate thousands of nonsense syllables, have people memorize series of them, and then chart the decay in their retention of the series, ending up with this kind of storehouse model. Fascinating work.

    The Platonic conception of memory
    â€œSo, anyway, I was at the University Research Library over at UCLA one day, leafing through their Ebbinghaus books, when I just happened to come upon Sonnabend’s three-volume
Obliscence
the next call letter over. It seemed like nobody had looked into those books in ages, they hadn’t been checked out in years, but I started reading—Sonnabend himself tells the story about the theory’s genesis, about Madalena Delani and Iguazú Falls in the preface—and I was completely bowled over. In part, I suppose, it was the romance of this theory that seemed to foretell its own oblivion. And then, just a few days later, I happened to be listening to Jim Svejda’s ‘Record Shelf program on KUSC, the local classical-music station, and he was doing a whole hour show devoted exclusively to Madalena Delani—that, for instance, is how I first found out about how she died. It was an incredible coincidence—in fact, everything associated with the story is like a tissue of improbable coincidences—how they almost met, how they didn’t, what either of them were doing there at the Falls in the first place. And those kinds of coincidences are also a special interest of ours here at the museum. We contacted the Chicago Historical Society and a fellow there named Rusty Lewis helped us enormously, particularly with the Gunther connection. The whole thing just grew and grew.”
    It was getting late, time to be going and gone. I looked down at the pamphlet again, at the archaic head. What was the story with him?
    â€œOh, Mr. J? That’s what my daughter calls him. He’s sort of like our mascot, I guess.”
    And the “A, E, N” on the banner outside?
    â€œWell, you may have noticed the line on top of the letters: that signifies negation or cancellation. So that the A, E, N’ means
non
-Aristotelian,
non
-Euclidean,
non
-Newtonian. Sort of one of our mottoes.”
    As I was opening the door to leave, I once again noticed the diorama of the urn and the moths. What about that?
    â€œOh, that’s a little urn surrounded by French moths—or, no, maybe Flemish, I’m not sure.”
    And what was the significance of the urn?
    â€œIt’s just an urn. I don’t think it means anything.”
    And that other diorama—the chemistry-set bottles?
    â€œOxide of titanium, oxide of iron, and alumina—those are the three chemical constituents of corundum, which forms the basis for all sapphires and rubies. Actually, we have the bottles out there because of the link to sapphires, which as you may know, have long been associated with qualities of faithfulness and endurance.”
    A FEW DAYS LATER I happened to be at the UCLA Library on another project when, half on a lark, I started riffling through the computerized card catalogue. “Ebbinghaus, Hermann,” I typed in, and sure enough there rose up a slew of references (“
Memory: A Contribution to Experimental
Psychology
, 1913,” etc.). Then I typed in “Sonnabend, Geoffrey,” and the screen churned for a while, before finally clocking in: “No record found.” I went up to the reference librarian and asked whether there wasn’t perhaps some more complete catalogue, one covering all the libraries in the system; and he gestured over toward the OCLC computerized database on his own desk, which covers not only all the libraries in the UC system but pretty much all the collections of any consequence in the entire country. He typed in “Sonnabend, Geoffrey,” but once again the answer came back: “No record found.” I subsequently called information in Chicago and asked