One day, this is what will happen.” (p.120) As Hollis points out, “Without my grandmother to recollect their stories, they would be useless trinkets, and the cabinet would be just an empty cupboard. To someone else, it contained themselves and their memories. It is a repository of your own creation – this goes there, this goes here, that I need tomorrow, this I must do something about, etc.Īnd a room can become someone’s legacy – and when they die, it is all worthless because what’s in there is not the “memory palace” of whoever is left to take care of it.Įver had to clear out the bedroom of a loved one who had died? You look at all the stuff and the worn clothes and the bits and pieces and think, what rubbish. So, a bedroom, sitting room, study or whatever – the room you spend the most time in – is arranged just as your memories are arranged. There’s nothing necessarily reassuring about the order of things.” (p.7) “An interior is a meeting place in which diverse elements resonate together to create a particular Stimmung but that mood need not be the domestic bliss that is usually expected. “‘Living here is my job,’ she retorts, ‘and doing it keeps me going.’” (p.11) Even if it takes them a week to do one thing, doing the one thing is their job and what keeps them going. Their job, after retirement especially, is to wash the dishes, vacuum the carpets, weed the garden, change the bed linen, pack away the toys, clean up after the pets. People’s homes are the places they live, but they are also their jobs – increasingly as they get older. That is why people are so attached so their homes, and why, when they go to old-age homes, they quickly lose their marbles and die. The room is the physical manifestation of a collection of memories. When you look at the room you’re in, you remember where you got something, and what you felt when you got it, and you know what you do with it. Hollis’s thesis is this: Interiors – particularly domestic interiors, and the way they are arranged, and what they contain, mirror the memories people have in their heads. 1986), who also made illustrations of architecture and interiors. The illustration is by Osbert Lancaster (d. Illustration of the sitting room of Hollis’s grandmother, the “Doll’s House”. ![]() ![]() With each example, he demonstrates the features and functions of a memory palace. In it, Hollis explains the concept of a memory palace, by juxtaposing the “Doll’s House”, the home of his grandmother, with caves, rooms, palaces and even mausoleums through the ages, from prehistoric times to the present day. This made it easier for me to get through the book, which requires the reader to linger over it and digest all the new ideas. What is a “memory palace”? Read on.Ĭritics praised Hollis’s writing in The Memory Palace as elegant and polished, and it is. The journey of discovery started with the title of the book. I learned truly intriguing things about the spaces we live in, which made other puzzle pieces fall into place. You can look at rooms as sets of measurements, colour schemes, furniture and personal “stuff”, but you can also look at them from an entirely different angle, which I discovered when I read The Memory Palace, by Edward Hollis. When I studied Interior Decorating years ago, I didn’t have the foggiest idea about the real significance of interiors. The Memory Palace – A Book of Lost Interiors, by Edward Hollis (Hardcover: 368 pages publisher: Portobello Books Sept.
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