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

John Crowley remembers:

I suppose journals should be all about the day as it passes, but my days are not mostly worth cataloguing -- the new toilet seat put in today -- the weather dreadful, cold and rain -- etc. -- so my mind travels back. One hot sunny afternoon, one of few lately, I was at the University nearby and I remembered summer at college, not my own college days but summers at Notre Dame, near where I lived in high school, and where my father was the doctor at the student infirmary. I had an old Schwinn English and in the summers (I think I'm remembering best the summer after sophomore year in high school) I would bike over to the college in the late morning and stay most of the afternoon. Most of that time I spent in the library, looking through old books and albums of theater history and stage design from the 20s and 30s (I didn't have a clear conception of how old they were). Gordon Craig. Max Reinhardt. Norman Bel Geddes. Then I would eat lunch at the Student Union, and drink Cokes in the dim under parts of that place, cool there though I doubt it was air-conditioned. I wanted to be a stage designer myself -- or rather that's where for the most part Iocated this intense inward visionary feeling and urge. It was my land, as others located theirs in poetry or the movies (which I loved too, both). Anyway that somnolent campus (UMass) was a Proustian ticket to that older one (ND) and the interior of the person I then was.

posted by william 2:45 PM
. . . 0 comments

Comments:

Post a Comment