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 writing in my graph-paper Composition book journal "Sixteen today," with a kind of wistfulness, on my sixteenth birthday (November 7th). I was wistful about Belinda. It was a few weeks after this day which of course didn't pan out. By now she was going with the close-on-the-attendance-sheet Bill F, and not me. I remember seeing my cousin Zlata that day. She'd just started at my school, a year or two back. I was sitting in the common area, at the top of the stairs with my journal open, writing the "Sixteen today" entry. She had a nice smile, and was just about to be part of her own group there and not need me to be nice to her any more. I registered how pretty she was, but I was more interested in being saturated with hopeful melancholy about Belinda. I think I got the tone with which I meant to infuse "sixteen today" out of Death of the Heart, which we read in a class that I took partly because a lot of Belinda's group was in it: "So I am with them, in London." (I mention this in the same entry.) It was a good tone for the writer I wanted to be writing the journals of.

posted by william 7:26 AM
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