Craig Mod berättar (i sitt nyhetsbrev) om en tio dagar lång, tyst, meditationsretreat i Japan, och om hur han börjar bygga ett minnespalats:
Each day, for ten days, I slowly populated the rooms of the house I grew up in — one in which I was just able to squeeze out ten distinct spaces. And so I came to be the owner of a house with a skanking planters peanut man,0 a computer that shoots spaghetti from its floppy disc drive, Aziz Ansari making a pizza, a human-sized game of Operation next to a roaring fireplace, two beautiful little blue birds flitting about a bedroom, a grandfather gently placing a blade into his stomach, the Vitruvian Man with glowing hands and head, the Insane Clown Posse high-fiving Pico Iyer.
In hindsight, I’m grateful I decided to make a memory palace. Without it, I doubt I would have been able to remember the precise order of pain and pleasure.
At the end of ten days I emerged triumphant, and upon sitting in that cafe in Kyoto and luxuriating in the texture of the Outside World, I was able to walk back through my house, the entire experience, transposing my memory palace, filling three pages of a notebook with details, a day-by-day blow of what it felt like to overcome my latent aversions, to come to love sitting.