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 one day there were a couple of large convex mirrors put up on the long, beautiful winding street I took to school.  I thought that was really strange.  I'd become used to those convex mirrors in our elevator, but I noticed them each time.  Their weirdness seemed appropriate to the fact that the elevator was a machine, and machines had weird parts.  But on the road?  It felt wrong, the intrusion of the high-rise environment into the outside world, as though the mirror's machined optics made nature into something seen by the quasi-mechanical, compound eye of an insect: an insect adapted to looking for cars.  The landscape shifted -- too much -- from a place where the occasional car drove by to a place designed for engaging with cars, shiny steel and glass reflected by the shiny steel mirror that captured and projected their image in spherical expansion throughout the space that it now centered and defined.

posted by William 4:31 PM
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I remember first hearing about Jack the Ripper on a Time Tunnel episode.  I think they met him.  He didn't seem that scary, just as his nickname didn't.  After all, we ripped toilet paper and the like.  It seemed an innocuous moniker.  And Time Tunnel was sufficiently anodyne in its action that they didn't convey any terror.  I was surprised later on when "Jack the Ripper" became a watchword for terror -- for serial killed violence, during the Zodiac murders, for example.  Because I always associated him with Time Tunnel.

posted by William 1:11 PM
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