January 29, 2012
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Mnemosyne
This post kids off a wandering series I’d like to form over the next several months, composed of snippets of memories and stories from our 10 years at New Covenant School. There’s no telling what will pop up as I clean out innumerable file drawers and scraps of life that have piled up in my classroom. So this should be a fun ride.
Mnemosyne was the Greek goddess of memory. She lent her name to one of the two pools of water that greeted weary travelers who had just arrived in the Underworld to be sorted, judged, and passed on into what would probably be a dull afterlife. (Only the heroes and super-villains got any excitement.) The pool which enabled a soul to remember its past was called The Pool of Mnemosyne. Most people rushed first to a larger pool near the entrance called The Pool of Lethe, which stripped them of all ability to remember their past life.
Though Poe’s tortured speaker in “The Raven” would later yearn for this “lethe and nepenthe” to free his mind from the gripping sorrow for the lost Lenore, the Greeks thought forgetting their entire lives would be a real bummer. Supposedly, people “in the know” could get special knowledge from Hermes to enable them to find the Pool of Mnemosyne once they arrived in Tartarus.
This is the oldest photo I have from NCS. It’s the girls’ basketball team in 2004 who won 2nd place, I think. This would have been our second year at NCS, and the girls here are Mallie Settle (NCS ’06), Alicia Lindstedt (07), Liz Nobblit Phillips (06), & Claire Settle (07).
