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 barbers not only kept snipping their scissors in the empty air as they circled around me: they also kept opening and closing the drawers under the ledge beneath the mirror. They took out cloths, talcs, paper cuffs, various hair setting liquids. Sometimes they'd open a drawer and close it without taking anything out, a kind of counterpoint to the clicking of the scissors on empty air. The scissors made a little more sense to me though: they were like practice swings in baseball or bounding the tennis ball on the line a couple of times before serving it. But what was this odd frenzied ritual they did with the drawers? At home I kept my drawers open till I got everything I needed out of them: shirts, underpants, socks, tie, etc. They were going into their drawers all day long. But it was as though they kept thinking they had what they wanted and could now close the drawer for the rest of the day. Except they were opening it again within another ten seconds. Would they never learn?

posted by William 3:33 PM
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