—Do you remember the first day I went to your house after my mother’s death?
Buck Mulligan frowned quickly and said:
—What? Where? I can’t remember anything. I remember only ideas and sensations.
— Ulysses, James Joyce
By this art you may contemplate the variation of the twenty three letters, which may be so infinitely varied, that the words complicated and deduced thence will not be contained with in the compass of the firmament.
—
Robert Burton The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) from the 8th ed. (1676) on the art of memory.
Curiously similar to Borges’ “Library of Babel.” http://jennyeagleton.tumblr.com/post/944460856/i-cannot-combine-certain-letters-as-dhcmrlchtdj
