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 my mother's double diamond ring (which I thought of a little bit as a more glamorous version of the purse hasps on my grandmothers' purses, but not on hers), and how it related to my uptown grandmother's single diamond. The single diamond seemed older fashioned, more stolid. It had my grandmother's physiognomy; it was an example I think of what Benjamin calls non-sensuous imitation. It fit her gnarled finger perfectly. My mother's double diamond was more glamorous, like her cats-eye glasses, and had her physiognomy: the resemblance was visible. Her mother, my downtown grandmother, didn't have a diamond ring at all, so there was a way, maybe, that I separated maternal and paternal vectors of dazzlement between my mother and my father's mother.

posted by william 11:31 AM
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