Responding to my earlier post on memory, Wes Callihan writes:

“We can’t always go back to the physical surroundings; that’s the problem. We can, however, go back in our imaginations and it seems that that was what the classical art of memory (the ‘palace of memory’) was all about. A sort of retaining the connection between the senses and the thing we desire to remember. Or a sort of bringing the physical surroundings with us. Francis Yates ( The Art of Memory ) argues that since the visual sense is so strong, to fix in the memory a place full of rooms and then to place images of the things we want to remember in those rooms and then later to mentally walk through those rooms and seeing in our mind the objects we placed there — all this as the Ad Herennium describes and Quintilian elaborates upon — this is to ‘return to the physical surroundings in which our intention was formed.’

“In other words, in practicing the classical art of memory (using loci), Augustine (who, as a professor of rhetoric would have been intimately familiar with the Ad Herennium and Quintilian) is doing precisely what you say in your last paragraph: ‘I remember what I wanted to say when I’m back in the physical surroundings where I first formed my intention. I can remember things from the distant past when I visit the house I grew up in.’ He just does that in his mind.”