Memorizing: Why and How

    People have been memorizing both literary and spoken works for millenniums. I would speculate that this act of deliberate preservation originated with and around the earliest civilizations. The memorizers' motivations undoubtedly varied widely. Maybe it was the earliest renditions of Sanskrit texts they sought to preserve, or the philosophies of Plato and his colleagues, of the epics of Homer. Whatever the target work was, it surely held some special meaning for the person who went through the trouble to memorize it.
     This is a fair summation of my involvement with Gibran's The Prophet. I feel this work must be deemed a religious one, yet it is unladen with the more standard religious dogma we are used to. Gibran instead speaks a religion of beauty. Something in the rawness of his message appeals to me both in the pragmatic and philosophical senses.
    But why memorize it? For several reasons-- I have always wanted to memorize a book. Partially in tribute to the author, partially in preparation for the post-apocalyptic world where books will be an extremely valuable commodity (a joke), and partially because I want to be able to spout off quotable quotes with affluence.

   My approach for memorization is pretty straightforward. I read and internalize small chunks of the text, stringing these chunks together into larger units-- first pages, then chapters. I find I'm able to memorize a 1-2 page section in about 30 minutes. Once I have all the pages in a chapter done, I read it aloud from memory. I leave the text sitting in front of me so I can check for mistakes periodically. With persistence I should be able to get through my copy of the  The Prophet's 114 pages in a matter of months. Only time will tell; wish me luck.     

My Theme

I'm fairly pleased with my blog design. I wasn't really thrilled with working with Wordpress (perhaps partly due to user error), but am very pleased with the flexibility available through Blogspot. I knew from the start I wanted a solid two-colunm design that focuses on the blogs posts and comments. I truly feel this needs to be the dominant part of any blog. The smaller second column allows users to navigate older and popular posts with ease. I also allows me to include a small bio. I think this is also useful since anyone that visits my blog can know something about me by spending only a couple seconds of their time. If they want to know more, they can go to the full profile via the link. This will be especially useful when linking my blog to other forms of media.