The Memory Palace…Book!

ROMAN MARS: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars. Back in 2008, I started listening to a podcast called The Memory Palace by my friend Nate DiMeo. It’s a history show, and it was unlike anything I’d ever heard before. Each episode wrapped a little known piece of history inside one of Nate’s poetic essays. His stories have an uncanny ability to weave together facts and insight to help us imagine the real lives of historical figures and to call to mind forgotten moments from the past. In fact, the Memory Palace is one of the early inspirations for 99% Invisible. And now, after 15+ years of making his podcast, Nate has a new book out called–you guessed it–The Memory Palace. It’s an anthology of some of his best stories from the show, plus a few new ones. We’re going to play two of those stories in a little bit. But first, I talk with Nate about making his podcasts and writing his book.

So, you open the book with this line: “Something moved me once.” And then you go on to describe all the ways that little bits of information have cut through the deluge of media that were bombarded with every day. Why did you open the book this way?

NATE DIMEO: I think that that first line that you read–that “something moved me once”–I trust the being moved. It’s fundamental to what I do with The Memory Palace, but I think it’s also fundamental of the way that I am. I think that, at some point as a younger person, I really became fascinated with the question of why do I remember this thing? Why out of all the days of one summer in 1989, when I was a young kid, is this the trip to the ice cream store that I remember? And some of that is just this simple and, to me, kind of lovely notion of we only remember memorable things. We only remember the thing that kind of snaps us out of our just sort of normal, day-to-day experience and grabs our attention. And so the question that I sort of asked myself over and over again when I’m writing these stories but also just in my life in general is, like, why was this the thing that caught my eye? And I’m fascinated to try to figure out why and then to also try to share that wonder that you experience when you learn that incredible fact about the past or that incredible turning point or just simply really connected with a story of someone living in another time that you will never meet–and then trying to find a way to share not just that story but share that feeling that I felt. I try to find a way to put it all together and share it with a listener.

ROMAN MARS: And so knowing that The Memory Palace is designed perfectly to deliver the type of thing you want in a podcast, when you were translating this to turn it into Memory Palace, the book, what were some of the other considerations you were juggling and thinking about and what levers were you pulling?

NATE DIMEO: In thinking about the podcast, I think about format all the time–the ways that the podcast is different than radio. And so it was exciting to then go and think about the book and think about what happens to some of these familiar stories when they get put down on the page. Some of it was like, “Does this story hold up on the page? Is there something that only works because of the way the music works? Or is there something that only works because of the way that I am able to have total control of the way that this is paced because I’m going to say these words when I want to say them?” And so part of the excitement was to try to figure out how, through prose, I could try to replicate some of those things. And so some of it was the kind of delight of doing that. But the other thing was I also realized that there was a number of different types of stories that I could tell that I just can’t tell, which is things that require you to look at stuff.

ROMAN MARS: And so could you give some examples of something that you couldn’t tell as a radio story that just worked really well in the book as a piece of written material?

NATE DIMEO: Yeah, absolutely. So, stories that were about the history of photography and stories that, over the course of the book, explore what it is to look at photographs through time. And I come to those stories sort of in the same way, which is I just look at stuff and wait to be moved. And so one day I was looking through some big tome about the history of photography. And in it–while I was learning about how the daguerreotype works and all that stuff–there was a little photograph of these three men on the roof of a building in Nashville in 1865. And one of the guys is standing in this gigantic contraption that looks a little bit like a telescope. And then there’s a thing that says that this is a solar camera. I’m like, “Oh, what’s a solar camera? Oh, it’s a thing that was designed to enlarge other photographs, but to make them really big.” And I was like, “Wow, I’ve never really seen a really big photograph from the 19th century.” And then the wonder comes in where I discover why, which is that none of them exist anymore–that these people built these solar cameras, they were a big deal for about 30 years, and because of the photographic process and the paper that they had to print them on, these made these images that themselves were often apparently not particularly precise because, as you blew them up, they’d start to warp and stuff like that. But they were very popular and they were in people’s homes–people that would have these life-sized photographs of people they knew for very short time. And not a single one exists anymore. And it’s those sorts of things that started to help me figure out what a Memory Palace story for the book could be.

ROMAN MARS: One of the things I love about a Memory Palace story is just how you capture all this humanity in the histories that you’re telling. But emotions and feelings–these are the kind of details that are often absent from the historical record. So, I’m curious how you think about working with that absence in your stories.

NATE DIMEO: Yeah, I think that what I’m really looking for are these little details that make the people that I’m reading about feel like real people–that there’s something about the way that this diarist, or whatever it is, has said something about the dress that was worn on this particular night that is then like, “Oh, you put on that dress because it’s that kind of night. I’ve experienced that kind of night before. I’ve experienced the one where you need to impress the in-laws or I’ve experienced the one where you need to catch that person’s eye in my own way.” In my own way and my own time, I felt that. And in the feeling comes the confidence that I have to use that factual thing as an anchor and then open up questions because I’m never making declarative statements about this is what this person felt, but essentially saying, “If you were in this situation, if you were having this kind of night in this kind of dress, don’t you feel like we’d feel this way?” And that’s where the kind of conjuring act of The Memory Palace is working well. That’s where it lives. It’s in the idea that just, by hanging out on those specific details and calling them to mind, you’re really kind of calling them to the imagination and you’re creating this space of internal kind of emotional possibilities that I think suddenly deepens these things that otherwise might be kind of thin.

ROMAN MARS: So, I know that–in the style of The Memory Palace, the podcast–it is sort of anathema to describe a thing before the thing happens, but I want to play some episodes. And if you want that experience, just go subscribe to The Memory Palace. Just listen to every one. You will love every single one of them. But here I was wondering if you could help me introduce some episodes so that we can give a little bit of the behind the scenes behind certain ones.

NATE DIMEO: Sure.

ROMAN MARS: And I want to talk about Below From Above. It’s a real 99PI, like… They’re going to see something be built or you’re going to experience something be built. You have talked about in your notes to this episode that this was a very early inspiration from Memory Palace–telling this story. Why was that?

NATE DIMEO: One of the formative inspirations for me as a thinker was definitely the Ken Burns documentary based on the book about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge–the combination of seeing that at the right time and being fascinated by the human toil and toll that its construction took, but then also being a young person driving to New York for the first time and being like, “I’m going to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge” and then finding this thing that feels, like, medieval in the middle of the city and realizing that it had to be because that’s how we made stuff then. It’s the only way we knew how with rocks and digging. And then–in walking over that bridge and realizing that this was the tallest place on Earth that wasn’t, like, a church spire that was manmade–feeling that “holy cow.” What a thing would’ve been. That feeling–that “holy cow”–has never left me about stories around the Brooklyn Bridge and was one of these things that hung with me that like, yeah, someday I want to make someone feel “holy cow” about this particular story in the same way that I did.

ROMAN MARS: Okay, let’s hear that story. And we’ll talk a little bit more about it on the other side.

NATE DIMEO (MEMORY PALACE): If you want to build a bridge, a long one over a large body of water or some reasonably impressive chasm, you’ll want to build a suspension bridge–one of those with the towers on either side, sticking up from the water or a hole in the ground, with a cable swooping down and up and down and up between them. And if you want that bridge to work, to hold the cars and the trucks and the minivans, to withstand a high wind, and to keep standing during an earthquake or a tsunami, those towers need to stay still so the rest of the bridge can move a little bit. It’s physics, just trust me. Those towers need to be anchored deep within the ground, so you will need to dig holes, which is hard enough to do in some rocky chasm in the Pyrenees of the Poconos. But in water, it’s a whole other thing.

So, if you want to build a bridge over water over the east river between Manhattan and Brooklyn, say, and it’s 1870 to pick a number at random, you need to find a way to dig underwater. So fill a bathtub and take a glass and flip the glass over and push the glass to the bottom of the tub. There’s air in the glass, there’s water in the tub, but it can’t get inside. You get it? It’s a diving bell and pictured tiny people in that glass chipping away at the porcelain or the vinyl at their feet with tiny picks and wee little shovels. Now the air will run out of that glass, so you’ll need a tube or a straw hooking up through the top and up and out past the surface of the water to let the good air in and the bad air out while they tap away those tiny people with their tiny tools digging at the bottom of your tub for some reason.

And that’s the idea. You build a watertight chamber, you find a way to keep the air circulating within that chamber, and you push it down to the bottom and you start to build your tower on top of it while the people inside dig away. Meanwhile, the increasing pressure of the growing tower helps push the chamber, which is called a “caisson,” deeper and deeper into the hole. So, if you are going to build a bridge over the East River in 1870, if you are going to physically connect the island of Manhattan with Brooklyn on the opposite shore for the first time since the Pleistocene, if you are going to connect the two cities and open up a path for travel and trade and commuters and tourists and stroller-pushing Park Slope parents, you are going to need to build a roadway that is 1,600 feet long with cables swooping from stone towers that rise more than 275 feet in the air. And you will need a caisson built of wood and metal–a capsized ship of a thing. You’ll need to float it out to the middle of the river and sink it to the bottom, 80 feet down, and then start digging another 44 feet on the Brooklyn side, 78 feet on the Manhattan side–through mud and silt and stone–until you hit bedrock. And you will need men to do the work.

They were Irishmen and Italians and Germans mostly–new arrivals–new Americans, who would pile into boats for the first shift on a January morning or just before dark for the second shift or just before midnight for the third and set out for the construction site a few hundred feet from shore, where the stone tower was beginning to rise from the water. And they’d step off and out onto the rough boards of the pier and descend one by one into a hole–into the darkness–a blast of heated air coming up from below. Iron rungs beneath their boots, lunch pails clacking against the walls, men below and men above coughing and cursing–cracking jokes in unfamiliar tongues. And then they’d come to a hatch and turn a wheel and descend into an iron chamber and be sealed within.

Down below this chamber, further still on the river bottom, 5,000 pounds of pressure pushed on every square foot of the timber caisson. It would’ve crushed it and the workers within, except pressurized air was pumped in. It balanced out the forces. Get the walls from blowing out and letting the river in. And it kept the men alive. But those men needed to be acclimated first to the conditions they would find below. And so they were sealed into this iron chamber.

And in would rush the pressurized air, up from a hole in the floor, and with it the pain–this pressure–this pushing deep in your ears, starting fast and pushing hard. It would be excruciating. And then it would slowly release. Though sometimes it wouldn’t, and you’d be stuck all day with it in your head, even after you’d heard a tapping at the bottom of the metal cell and the trap door at your feet had opened up. And a man streaked with grime and mud and sweat hooked his head up into the chamber and beckoned you down into the caisson, into another world at the bottom of the river, and into the gloaming. And the blue limelight flicker along the walls rippling in the water that pooled in the mud and the muck between the boards and the planks that crisscrossed the river bottom–that creaked and splintered and sank beneath the feet of the men, 225 at a time, there in the caisson. The roof a few feet above their heads–pine beams sealed together with tar to keep the water out and the 60,000 pounds of rock, the Brooklyn Tower, from crushing them while they worked.

It was hot–80 degrees at least even in January–and wet. They’d sweat through their clothes before they’d barely started swinging a pick or lifting a shovel–scooping up silt in sediment, chipping away at boulders left there by receding glaciers millennia before, and coming upon fossils, ferns, shells, and strange things long gone from the earth. There was this smell which was kind of no smell. Something with the pressure in the air and your brain in that atmosphere seemed to trick the nose, which may have been for the best, what with the sweating men and smoke and the slime and the mud and no bathrooms–just a dark corner or a bucket or this box hey had, this contraption, where you’d go in a trough and then, every now and then, everything inside would get whooshed up with the pneumatic tube and rocket the hundred-odd feet to the surface where it would all aspirate in a foul cloud above the river.

And your voice wouldn’t work right either. Your words would come out thin and high, like a girl’s to their ears, which worked well enough to hear the unrelenting clang of metal on rock, the grunts and lamentations of laboring men digging away at the river bottom, helping the caisson sink deeper and deeper, pushed down into the earth by the ever-growing weight of the ever-growing tower. Some weeks would go by and they barely would’ve sunk the thing six inches. All that digging, all that drilling, all that chipping–kicking sparks–all those times they had hit a stone and not known what lay below… If it would take you an hour to clear on your own or if that was just what you and a dozen dudes would be doing for the next week–or six–diving down blind into black pools, feeling around for dropped tools, eating your lunch from a tin on a rock in a box a hundred feet more below the surface of the East River…

Sometimes a big boat–a steamer or a freighter–would pass by and the displaced water would push against the sides of the caisson and the board would snap and water would jet in and the chamber would start to fill until men with hammers and pitch tar could plug it. Sometimes men would pass out or cry out at the pain in their ears and the pressure in their heads or their chest. Sometimes they would rise back to the surface out from the heat and into the cold, rise up too fast without being properly decompressed, get the bends, get air bubbles–little nitrogen bubbles in their blood–which is as painful as it sounds. And sometimes men wouldn’t really recover. One day, a fire broke out and it looked like the side of the caisson was going to blow in and the roof cave in and the tower come down and crush everyone inside. But it didn’t. And the men came back to work the next day and went down into the hole–into that alien world–and again the next day and again and again…

Think of a man who dug, who swung a pick, who bent to hoist a shovel full of river bottom, who hefted buckets of stone. Think of his shoulders and chest–triceps and lats like stone. Think of his head on a pillow packed with straw in a boarding house at the end of the night. No aspirin, no ibuprofen or Vicodin or heating pads, just pain. Think of those shoulders and arms and joints within–of bursitis and micro tears, fraying tendons, rotator cuffs. No treatment. No insurance. Think of years living in that body after months working in that caisson. And think of a day, in 1871, when the man in that body steps up through the hatch and into the air, cold on his skin, when he knows that the job is done–that he is done with the river bottom for good.

There was a parade when they opened the bridge on a spring day in 1883–a perfect day, they say–14 years after they’d started construction, 14 years after the first man had gone down into the Brooklyn caisson, eight years after the last men climbed out of the one on the Manhattan side and they’d poured concrete down into the hole and sealed it up. 50,000 people came in from out of town–came in off boats from Connecticut and Massachusetts and Jersey. The President came up from D.C. People sold souvenirs, bands played, there was bunting–it was a day for bunting–and little flags in little girls’ hands. There were speeches and photographs and fireworks and a quarter of a million people walking the bridge in its first 24 hours, marveling at the thing–this thing they’d watched grow for years, for half their lives, or for all their lives, depending. They could now walk from Manhattan to Brooklyn, see those towers up close, see their city from high up–higher off the ground than most of them had ever been–see seagulls and seabirds and terns turning beneath their feet. 250,000 people–the governor, the mayors, various dignitaries, prominent business owners, a who’s who of people no one remembers now–marveling at the thing in the river, so far beneath their feet, and with them, somewhere there in the crowd, men who could look down at the river and know just what lay beneath it.

ROMAN MARS: I love that story so much. Just so people know, your book–The Memory Palace–you’re making an audio book of it. And you’ve asked different people to read the story. So, that’s something new for the audiobook. And I’m reading this story, which is one of my favorites, so I’m so happy about that. But one of the things that strikes me about hearing it again is that you never say the name “Roebling,” the civil engineer who designed the Brooklyn Bridge. And you also don’t say the name of his wife, who is the person who finished it when Roebling couldn’t. Could you talk me through that decision? What’s the story that you wanted to tell?

NATE DIMEO: Yeah, this is the story– I mean, I could have told a story about Roebling–a story about a dude doing dude things for sure. He’s a guy, he’s got a wife, he’s got a job to do, he gets sick–it’s an incredible story.

ROMAN MARS: It is, yeah.

NATE DIMEO: Absolutely. If someone were to ever ask me to write my Titanic, I would find some way to write some story about some immigrant kid in Brooklyn and some beautiful young woman in Manhattan and somehow they get wrapped up in the story of the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s an amazing story. But if The Memory Palace is interested in anything, it is that place where real people with real bodies live. And I’ve seen pictures of the caissons. And I’ve seen Ken Burns’ documentary trying to recapture that. But I realized that the best way to capture that is in the imagination–to try to place people as best as I can inside a caisson, and not just inside a caisson, but inside a caisson and then out again. The fact that this is your work–that this is what you need to do–the terror of it is just astounding to me. So some of it’s like, “Let’s come back, and let’s remind people what this is really like.” But once you start doing that kind of act of active, empathetic imagination and trying to really put yourself into it, all these other things come out, like, “Oh my God, then they’re doing this at a time before ibuprofen.”

ROMAN MARS: [laughs]

NATE DIMEO: They’re working this hard with no one paying for their retirement. It really is incredible. And it is when you really dive in–and it’s not just to put yourself in these shoes–but just try to imagine the human experience as you know it through the lens of these conditions and through the lens of this time. It’s one of the most powerful things. I don’t mean it’s the most powerful thing that I achieve through these stories because who knows? But it’s one of the most powerful things that I simply do–that every couple of weeks, when a Memory Palace episode comes out or I’m sitting down to write a story for this book, for it to work right, it requires me to stop my day and consider these fundamental truths that we will all die one day, that our moment is fleeting, that other people are other people, and that it’s worth thinking about them. It’s worth trying to get people to connect in the same way and maybe feel that thing that I’ve always kind of found personally useful.

ROMAN MARS: More stories from The Memory Palace and Nate DiMeo after the break…

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: So, we’re back talking with Nate DiMeo about his new book, The Memory Palace. And we’re featuring a couple of stories from the show today. So, Nate, I wanted to play one more piece from the book. And while lots of Memory Palace stories are short, this is the first story in the book and maybe the shortest of the bunch. So, why is it first? And what do you think would be interesting for people to know before they hear it?

NATE DIMEO: This is the first story, and it is often one that, like… For instance, if I’m writing an email to someone that I want to interview me and they don’t know the show, I might send them this one because, the truth of the matter is, I think it does a lot of things that The Memory Palace does. So, why not give someone something that is concentrated and punchy that will tell you what you’re in store for? And this story about Samuel Morse–this is a story that really speaks to the concision at all costs thing. I love short things. One of the most formative things I ever saw was at UFCW Hall in Santa Barbara, California. I saw a band called Portraits of Pass, the hardcore band from Santa Cruz, California. They played for 11 minutes.

ROMAN MARS: [laughs]

NATE DIMEO: And they were amazing. They played, like, five songs, and they were done. And I just realized that–not only did it have the energy I wanted and the emotionality that I wanted and all this just good stuff of youth and wonder–there was just real magic in getting in and getting out. How little can I tell someone about this event but still get them to feel deeply–still get them to be outraged or tearful or make them want to go hug their kid a little harder?

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, totally. And this story about Samuel Morse definitely does that. So, let’s hear it and we’ll have a little more to say on the other side.

NATE DIMEO (MEMORY PALACE): Samuel Finley Breese Morse spent the first 35 years of his life learning to paint at Andover, at Yale, and in London at the Royal Academy. He studied the works of the masters to learn how Michelangelo built bodies that seemed to pulse and shutter out of mere oil and shadow and crosshatch, to learn how Raphael summoned the spark of inner life with a single stroke of pure white in the dusky ochre of a noblewoman’s eye, to learn how to create illusions of space and distance, to learn how to conjure the ineffable through the mere aggregation of lines and dots and stretch canvas. He learned how to paint.

And in 1825, Morse was living in New Haven, Connecticut, with his wife, Lucretia, and two young sons. And a third child was on the way, due any day. One night, a courier delivered a message. The city of New York wanted to pay Morse a thousand dollars to paint a portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette. The hero of the revolution was coming to Washington to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the start of the war. And he would sit for Morse if the painter could leave right away. So, he packed his easel and his brushes and his paints and clothes that were good enough to wear when meeting a man like Lafayette. And he kissed his pregnant wife, and he left that night. On another night, a week later, Morse was in his rented studio in Washington, preparing for the arrival the next morning of his distinguished subject. He heard a knock on the door, and there was a courier, breathless and dirty from a hard ride on hard road, handing him a note that was five words long. “Your dear wife is convalescent.”

He left that night. He rode for six days straight on horseback and in the backs of juddering wagons, wrapped in blankets against the cold wind of October nights. And when he made it to New Haven and ran through fallen leaves up to the house on Whitney Avenue, he learned that his wife was dead. In fact, she had died before the courier had knocked on his door in Washington. In fact, she had already been buried some morning while he was on the road, while he was racing home to be by her side and sit with her while she got better. Samuel Finley Breese Morse spent the next 45 years of his life trying to make sure no one would have to feel the way he felt that night ever again. Samuel Finley Breese Morse spent the next 45 years inventing the telegraph to turn real space and real distance into an illusion in developing Morse code–dots and lines–that could transmit the stuff of real lives and of dying wives.

ROMAN MARS: I mean, you’re right. This is heartbreaking. It’s a very short story. And there is a kind of surprise reveal, even though it is not a hidden thing you did. You said the name Samuel Morse, but you gave all his middle names to maybe throw you off a little bit.

NATE DIMEO: That is the technique. Yeah.

ROMAN MARS: So, it’s kind of set up as a mystery, even though it’s not required to be a mystery for it to be effective. And what you talk about in the story is the feeling of Samuel Morse’s grief over the loss of his wife and how that feeling could have propelled the invention of Morse code, which is not the thing most people talk about.

NATE DIMEO: Yeah, I think that so much of my work–but so much of just my life in general–feels like it is thinking about the gap between history as it’s told and life as it’s experienced. And that is our own stories. We once had a bad breakup, and we tell the story of that breakup to different audiences for different reasons. And somewhere in the telling is the truth. But what is missing is those days of misery or that terrible feeling you have in your stomach when you know something’s got to change and it doesn’t. I mean, that’s where we live–in those feelings. And so this is a story that is ultimately kind of about that thing. It’s like, here, we’ve created this code and this technology that allows us to communicate in new ways and ushers in a whole new era and other technology will be built on it and everyone will be able to do this thing and communicate across distances from now on forever. But underlying it is pain. Underlying it is art. Underlying it is life. It’s a quintessential Memory Palace story because this is what I think about all the time.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, yeah. So, you’ve done the podcast for 15 years. The book is brand new. What do you hope people feel when they hear the show or when they pick up the book? What’s the goal? What are you trying to reach?

NATE DIMEO: Both you know me but you also know the show. And I really am an earnest person. And there is something about seeing the totality of these people’s lives I just find personally useful. I find it centers me or something, and it keeps me honest or snaps me into a certain type of mindfulness, for as overused as the word is. And in these stories, I hope a person picks up the book. I hope that they’re having kind of a weird day. And I hope that it sparks that little bit of wonder. I hope it kind of brings them back to their present moment and hangs with them in the same way as these things that I discovered once. I hope that my stories are those things. I hope they hang with them and they want to tell their spouse about them and that they linger in the same way that these really formative experiences did for me.

ROMAN MARS: Well, Nate DiMeo, thank you so much for the podcast, Memory Palace. Thank you so much for the book, The Memory Palace. Thank you for inspiring me and talking with me. I really enjoyed it.

NATE DIMEO: Literally right back at you on all of those things. You just shove in “99% Invisible,” you shove in “Roman Mars,” and right back at you.

ROMAN MARS: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Jayson De Leon. Edited by Neena Pathak. With additional production help from our intern Taylor Shedrick. Mix by Martín Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real and George Langford.

Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Emmett FitzGerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Joe Rosenberg, Gabriella Gladney, Kelly Prime, Jeyca Maldonado-Medina, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as our brand new Discord server, where over 5,000 people are talking about The Power Broker and architecture–a bunch of other stuff. There’s even podcast recommendations and book recommendations. There’s a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI, at 99pi.org.