We were assigned to blog about a passage from one of the books for the class. This following snippet from page 19 of The Art of Memory caught my eye. It trails off of a lengthy quotation from Cicero which I had no desire to double-quote.

"From these concluding words of Cicero's on the art of memory we learn that the objection to the classical art which was always raised throughout its subsequent history--and is still raised by everyone who is told of it--was voiced in antiquity. There were inert or lazy or unskilled people in Cicero's time who took the common sense view, to which, personally, I heartily subsribe--as explained earlier I am a historian only of the art, not a practioner of it--that all these places and images would only bury under a heap of rubble whatever little one does remember naturally."

I found this interesting, that Yates seems to be admitting that she doesn't really believe in the type of memory training she writes about. And yeah, we all wonder perhaps if it could be truly possible for someone to recite Virgil backwards without a mistake. Wouldn't the mind at some point in time just crap out on you? I suppose it was just the difference of tone that she has from ,say Kane, who appears to 'believe' thouroughly in the brand of human communication and storytelling he is writing about. But I could be jumping the gun here on Yates; we'll see how the rest of the book goes. And of course, most anything is possible, some things are just more common than others.