>>4953290The
air, which had been filled with boisterous laughter moments before, was
smoky and silent. Teams of rescuers set to work frantically digging
through the collapsed building. The corpses they pulled out of the wreckage were mangled beyond recognition. No one could even say for
sure who had been inside. One tragedy compounded another.
Then something remarkable happened that would change forever how
people thought about their memories. Simonides sealed his senses to
the chaos around him and reversed time in his mind. The piles of marble
returned to pillars and the scattered frieze fragments reassembled in the
air above. The stoneware scattered in the debris re-formed into bowls.
The splinters of wood poking above the ruins once again became a
table. Simonides caught a glimpse of each of the banquet guests at his
seat, carrying on oblivious to the impending catastrophe. He sawScopas
laughing at the head of the table, a fellowpoet sitting across from him
sponging up the remnants of his meal with a piece of bread, a nobleman
smirking. He turned to the windowand sawthe messengers approaching,
as if with some important news.
Simonides opened his eyes. He took each of the hysterical relatives
by the hand and, carefully stepping over the debris, guided them, one by
one, to the spots in the rubble where their loved ones had been sitting.
At that moment, according to legend, the art of memory was born.
