Frances A. Yates fans will remember in her The Art of Memory how the goal of an Hermetic education was to consciously construct one’s model of Reality. Either construct your own, or have one constructed for you.
The notion that one “constructs one’s own reality” later only became a debate in connection with Piaget and his portrayal of stages in knowledge acquisition and behavioral repertoire. His “constructivism” became controversial and polarizing, portending later storms that would cross the Educational Plain (a teenage wasteland for the most part), wreaking havoc.
If you could furnish your home office as a planetarium, now wouldn’t that be grand, but then how would it work? Perhaps VR glasses would work just as well?
My friend John sold an inflatable planetarium model, showing up in schools and producing a show the kids never forgot. They’d file in, in small groups, and sit on the floor of this thing. I’ve been in it once. Amazing.
Perhaps I’m thinking too literally about everything.
The Art of Memory, with its special Memory Desks, and Memory Rooms, puts us in touch with the extended metaphors that later become our electronic…
