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 posting this over thirteen years ago:

I remember that my father had an autographed picture of Ralph Branca, the Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher. I knew he who was: he had thrown the pitch that Bobby Thompson hit into the three-run homer that gave the Giants the 1951 pennant: "the shot heard round the world." My father got the autograph in 1952. I was amazed that somehow Ralph Branca was able to continue to function in the world, giving autographs and such. It was a lesson to me in the fact that people do recover from disaster. But I had contempt for him for recovering. Somehow, I thought this historical moment had to be the end -- at least for the loser. Baseball and fiction didn't seem much different for me at the time: winners could go on living in the world of our knowledge, but losers got superseded. And yet Ralph Branca endured. (I think he endured until the nineties, in fact, though I'm not sure.)

In fact he outlived my father (I guess he was only a few years older), and died this week, at 90.

posted by William 10:01 AM
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