Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
          --Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

I remember the surprise I felt at hearing the voices on the first animated Peanuts cartoons I saw. I was looking forward to them -- some Halloween or Christmas special. I loved Peanuts. I had a Linus doll from when I was very small -- where is it now? -- with him wearing a red shirt and holding his blanket and sucking his thumb. But I read Peanuts later, and didn't put the doll and the comic strip together for a long time, since by then the doll was an invisible part of the everyday background of stuff in our rooms. Probably I watched that first animation before I noticed the doll again. And it was the voices that surprised me -- kids' voices (or probably someone like Hetty Galen's voice). Of course the animated characters would have to have kids' voices, but I imagined them as I heard them in my head, which is to say speaking in the completely muted, unbreathed, subvocalized sound of the inner ear or still more inner mind, the sound you hear in thought pitched just higher than the almost inaudible torrent of blood in your ears, the sound just beyond the sonic range of sound, so that it becomes pure reading. I think that was the first time that I realized the sound or silence of reading was different from anything you perceived in the world. This may have been the beginning of my sense of the world as strangely, unpleasantly normal.

posted by william 9:37 PM
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