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 barber shop counter in front of the mirror you were facing had drawers and that the barbers used these drawers incessantly. Drawers! They were small, much smaller than our kitchen drawers, more like the drawers on my toy furniture. But the barber would open the drawer, take out a comb or a napkin or scissors, close the drawer, clip the scissors overhead in a way that my mother absolutely forbade at home because she thought it would make them dull, do something rapid, put the scissors or the comb back in the drawer and close it, open another drawer and take something else out and close the drawer, open it again to return something, over and over again. I always thought of drawers as places you put things away, put the away for a while because you no longer needed them right now. If you're just putting something down inside it for a second you leave the drawer open. But the barbers had infinite patience with the repetitions: opening and closing and opening and closing. They treated the drawers like shelves or surfaces, except they kept closing them, as though they were done for now. But the haircuts went on forever and they were never done.

posted by william 5:25 PM
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