Great post. Memory, shifting sands, indeed. Thank you for Toni Morrison's paper. Do not doubt of your usefulness on this earth: your thoughts, your prompts, your readings, your thoughts on your readings are invaluable. Thank you.
Thanks Emily! I love this post. Memory is such an intriguing and complicated part of all of our lives, as is our relationship with it. I've long believed I have a memory like a steel trap, but often when I'm with some of my oldest friends (from high school or college or my twenties) and we recall something that happened years (decades) ago, someone will tell a story to which my response is a bewildered, "She did? We were? I was?" Likewise, I can retell a different story to which they have a similar response, but collectively we can cobble together most of what we think happened. I have one friend who claims to recall practically nothing from the time we both lived in Athens, GA, but remembers that one of my housemates worked in a chicken processing plant, which I have zero memory of.
Yesterday I finished Dani Shapiro's extraordinary novel, "Signal Fires," which I can't say enough wonderful things about, including that I wept after reading the final sentence. (I love everything she has written.) In it memory is such a profound element that it almost serves as an individual character, in addition to the memories of the actual characters, including the fractured ones of a woman with Alzheimer's. I highly recommend!
Great post. Memory, shifting sands, indeed. Thank you for Toni Morrison's paper. Do not doubt of your usefulness on this earth: your thoughts, your prompts, your readings, your thoughts on your readings are invaluable. Thank you.
Thanks Emily! I love this post. Memory is such an intriguing and complicated part of all of our lives, as is our relationship with it. I've long believed I have a memory like a steel trap, but often when I'm with some of my oldest friends (from high school or college or my twenties) and we recall something that happened years (decades) ago, someone will tell a story to which my response is a bewildered, "She did? We were? I was?" Likewise, I can retell a different story to which they have a similar response, but collectively we can cobble together most of what we think happened. I have one friend who claims to recall practically nothing from the time we both lived in Athens, GA, but remembers that one of my housemates worked in a chicken processing plant, which I have zero memory of.
Yesterday I finished Dani Shapiro's extraordinary novel, "Signal Fires," which I can't say enough wonderful things about, including that I wept after reading the final sentence. (I love everything she has written.) In it memory is such a profound element that it almost serves as an individual character, in addition to the memories of the actual characters, including the fractured ones of a woman with Alzheimer's. I highly recommend!