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♫ Parnassius mnemosyne ♫
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I enter the corridor leading to my memory palace. Of course, this long hallway doesn’t actually exist—not even on blueprints—any more than the palace itself, whose sprawling rooms are accessed through the colorful doors of the entrance corridor. It is a pure invention, a figment of my imagination. I traverse it in my mind repeatedly to give my feeble memory a boost. Whenever I want to remember something new, I either tuck it away in the appropriate room or simply add on another cabinet.
In the palace, I know every detail: the rooms, wall niches, windowsills, the half-height columns, tables, secretary desks, dressers, shelves, and printer’s trays—all the places where I mentally deposit things I want to remember. Or must.
The entrance corridor, however, is empty. It contains no niches or furniture—only the doors to the various wings of the palace. Behind the white one reside all the phone numbers I’m supposed to know by heart. (This is also where I would have stored the number Pi to any number of decimal places, had I the ambition to memorize it.) Then come doors in every color of the rainbow, beginning with infrared and ending with ultraviolet. From scientific discoveries, formulas, and jargon to biological facts, technical terms, and the life dates of famous researchers, all the way to the great milestones of human history—you can find just about everything here that ever seemed worth remembering to me. Whether it’s the names of the primordial continents (and the potential ones of our future, like Pangaea Ultima and Amasia), the 398 expletives from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, or the 28 possible features of a leaf (from hastate to seven-pinnate).
At the very back, there is a black door. It leads to the basement of my palace. There, I store… but perhaps I should keep that to myself. In any case, this corridor—the one with the many colorful doors through which I enter the wings of the palace—inspired me to write a few short texts. I regularly deposit their content, their order, and their connections to each other and to other works of literature behind the orange door. Just as I am doing now with this very piece: traveling to deposit it in a special spot within my personal cabinet of curiosities, never to be forgotten again.
Method of loci: 
Amasia:
4 of the expletives from Finnegans Wake: 