Memory landscapes

The cult of personality inherent in memorial structure for great rulers, like Maussollos s mausoleum or Khufu s pyramid at Giza, imbues the landscape with the authority of the dead ruler whose majesty demanded the monument. These Wonders are dramatic memorial landscapes used to enlarge and support the legacy the ruler. 

Edman, L. Rigler, R. Memory landscapes of single-enzyme molecules. PNAS 2000, 97, 8266-8271. 

Odors affect human behavior more than we realize. They are now appreciated as important in human health and disease. Above all, the powerful role of learning is impressive. Odors become associated with pleasant and unpleasant experiences and can retain their hedonic value lifelong. This applies to food, to social and sexual relationships, and to environments such as houses, workplaces, or landscapes. Writers rather than scientists have described such anecdotes. In Remembrances of Things Past, Marcel Proust evoked a flood of childhood memories by the taste of a madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea. Jean-Paul Sartre tells in his autobiography Les Mots how the halitosis of his grade-school teacher became to him the odor of authority. 

Landscape myths and memories share two common characteristics their surprising endurance through the centuries and their power to shape institutions that we still live with. 

Schama, Simon. 1995. Landscape and Memory. New York Vintage Books. 

The situation is somewhat reminiscent of a content-addressable memory [72], in which partial information is converted by the brain to recover the complete information. Such content-addressable memories [72], as well as the energy landscape [73] suitable for prebiotic evolution [74], have been modeled through spin glasses [75]. The energy landscape of spin glasses is also characterized by diversity and stability arising from randomness and frustration, which is quite distinct from the the physical mechanisms of short tubes in the marginally compact phase. 

Gerald Skibbow didn t like the lounge at all. The artificial asteroid cavern was too removed from his experience. Its cyclorama landscape unsettled him, and the lounge s expensive modem setting reminded him of the arcology he d yearned to escape from. He didn t want memories. His family dwelt in memories, the only place they did live now. 

Anne Janowitz, England s Ruins Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Oxford Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 20. For discussion of a rather different appropriation of the Du BeUay, Francisco de Quevedo s Roma antigua y modema , see Rodrigo Cacho Casal, The Memory of Ruins Quevedo s Silva to Roma antigua y modema . Renaissance Quarterly 62 (2009), pp. 1167-203. 

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