the old magic that made me

Tracey Durnell here quotes someone else who has reached independently a conclusion I’ve long held: that one’s book shelves operate in a way analogous to a memory palace. As I trek ever deeper into the plains of middle age, I find it harder to recall unprompted so much as the titles of some books I’ve read—but a glimpse of the right shelf, with its spines of fonts and colour, will often deliver not just the titles but the shapes and weight of the stories or theories contained therein, sometimes with surprising levels of clarity and detail. The physical form of the book somehow contains not just the pulp and the print, but the ideas and images as well, in a rather more literal expression of Mieke Bal’s narratological theories than I suspect she ever intended. (Of course, we should allow for the possibility that my knowledge of—and professional closeness to—said theory provides a sort of mental-architectural metaphor that scaffolds this effect. I should also note that the one thing that…