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 that the word deaf came up a lot in our house because my uptown grandmother was pretty profoundly deaf from her twenties or thirties on (I remember the hearing aid she wore until she had an operation when I was seven or so). I remember that I felt something like the same surprise that I experienced on finding out that "dumb" meant "mute" and not "stupid" (a discovery that must be pretty typical in English-language childhoods, among hearing children anyhow) when I found out that there was this other thing, death, which was considerably more significant and also more widespread than being deaf. No operations for that. But I clung for a while to the idea that death was a kind of anomaly, like being deaf, only more so, and not really applicable to most of us, not even my grandmother, who didn't have to go farther, so I thought then, than being deaf.

posted by william 12:07 AM
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