This is the memory palace of Nate de Mayo.

Samuel Finley Briece Morse spent the first 35 years of his life learning to paint.

At Andover at Yale, in London at the Royal Academy, he studied the works of the Masters to learn

how Michelangelo built bodies that seemed to pulse and shudder 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

and the dusky ochre of a noble woman'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 canvass, he learned how to paint.

And in 1825 Morse was living a New Haven Connecticut with his wife Lucretia and two young sons.

And a third child was on the way.

Do 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 closed that were good enough

to wear when meeting a man like Lafayette.

And he kissed his pregnant wife and he left that night.

...