Posts Tagged ‘memory’
“Time moves in one direction, memory in another”*…
* William Gibson
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As we Dance to the Music of Time, we might spare a thought for Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. An accomplished writer (her poems and her letters home from Turkey, where her husband was Ambassador, were widely influential), Lady Mary was perhaps as importantly a health-care pioneer: she was instrumental in establishing the practice of vaccination against smallpox.
Her last words, uttered on this date in 1762, were– appropriately enough– “It has all been most interesting.”
Lady Mary, with her son Edward (source)
We can remember it for you wholesale…
source: James Madison University
The good folks at EU Design, a web hosting and design firm, maintain a compendium of mnemonics…
Mnemonics (pronounced “ne-mon’-ics”) is the art of assisting the memory by using a system of artificial aids – rhymes, rules, phrases, diagrams, acronyms and other devices – all to help in the recall of names, dates, facts and figures.
From English monarchs to the world’s longest rivers, from the periodic elements to the Bond films of Sean Connery, Mnemonics offers over 120 helpful formulae… as the site suggests, “you never know what might just be useful to remember.”
As we prepare to put our answer in the form of a question, we might raise a celebratory cup of tea to the incomparable Jane Austen, born this date in 1775.
Watercolor portrait of Jane Austen believed to be by her sister, Cassandra
Merry Melodies…
For Proust, it was a sugary cookie; but for many, music is the gateway to memories deep and rich… a song from years ago can catapult one directly back to the time and place– and into the feelings– of those by-gone days.
Lest one forget, Songs You Used to Love… a “time machine” that can transport one back into moods and memories past.
As we look for those old yearbooks, we might note that this was a big date for broadcast music: on this date in 1948, CBS telecast a concert by the Philadelphia Philharmonic; *and on the same day, the NBC Orchestra also performed on the televsion airwaves– the first symphony telecasts in the U.S. Indeed, the NBC concert was also carried on a several AM and FM radio stations, making it also the first ever simulcast.
