Aristotle on the aggravating features of recollection

Happy new year, everybody.

Since we returned from our holiday triangle trek, JM and I have been doing brainy work in the morning (well, I've been reading some and researching the local real estate market), and then manual work in the afternoon (namely, organizing shit and throwing shit out).

New Year's Day will be no different. I started 2009 by reading two Aristotelian treatises that have a lot to say about sense perception: On Sense and Sensible Objects, and On Memory and Recollection. There were lots of great tidbits in these short pieces, but my favorite comes in a long meditation on how sometimes once the faculty of recollection is set in motion it becomes unstoppable, as when we try to remember something but can't, and then it eats away at us, or, "in the case of names, tunes and sayings, when any of them has been very much on our lips; for even though we give up the habit and do not mean to yield to it, we find ourselves continually singing or saying the familiar sounds"  (453a29-32). 

That's right. Aristotle theorized earworms.  

Off to organize some tools.