reach. Not only do the topics — and the succession of topics — return, but so do the responses, one by one, and even the uncertainties, our mutterings when we are not able to find the right word, the digressions we allow ourselves. I would like to make clear that our conversations are neither academic nor planned; they are, rather, exchanges among friends (all highly cultured, for sure) with the endless shifts of direction typical of any conversation. Without much effort, I achieve an exact duplicate, though one that is even richer precisely because it is a duplicate. Memory allows me to go more deeply into ideas that pass by too quickly in the course of reality. I can stop wherever I want and contemplate a thought or its expression, analyze the mechanisms that articulate it, discover a defect in an argument, make a correction, retrace certain steps. I look at these conversations, which have become miniaturizations, through a magnifying glass, and my sleepless contemplations render them as beautiful and flawless as jewels. Their very disorder, redundancies, and lack of purpose are swathed in an artistic iridescent sheen because of and thanks to repetition.
Take, for example, my reconstruction last night of the conversation I had yesterday afternoon with one of my friends. We met, as he and I always do, in a café downtown, and while drinking our coffee, we began our dialogue by casually exchanging comments about a movie that had been shown on television the evening before and that we both had happened to see. It was a conventional movie, mere entertainment laced with a few pretensions that did not fool us in the least. My friend and I share the unobjectionable habit of watching banal shows on television at night in order to relax. We also share a distaste for those so-called “cultural” programs that are shown so widely on cable channels. Th e fact is, the situation of a man of culture is symmetrically inverse to that of the common citizen, who — after a day of prosaic and practical activities — turns on the television set in search of some spiritual elevation. On the contrary, for those of us who have spent our day in the company of Hegel or Dostoyevsky, such “cultural” programs are a waste of time, and for this same reason, as well as their intrinsic worthlessness, we find them paltry and narrow-minded, if not downright ridiculous.
We’d both seen only fragments of this movie; due to tedium and channel surfing as well as domestic distractions, we’d seen different parts, one of us more at the beginning and the other more at the end. But that was enough; stereotypical Hollywood productions of this kind can be fully deduced from one or two scenes, the same way paleontologists can reconstruct an entire dinosaur out of a single vertebra. If one keeps watching, it is only to confirm what one already knows, a confirmation that, difficult as this may be to admit, brings its own satisfaction.
So, we understood each other’s comments. Something so trivial, of course, did not call for much commentary on our part, and none would have been made had I not mentioned, with a smile, a fairly gross error that the producers had made. It was as follows: the protagonist, a humble goatherd in the Ukraine . . . was wearing a Rolexwatch! I burst out laughing when I said it, and when remembering it in bed, a smile surely spread across my face. In the act of doing both things — laughing in reality and smiling upon remembering it — I realized that the blank expression on my friend’s face was of someone who doesn’t understand what he is hearing. Here it is appropriate to add an aside: a memory can be identical to what is being remembered; at the same time, it is different, without ceasing to be the same. My friend’s look of incomprehension, which I saw while sitting across from him at the small table in the café, was precisely that: a request for an explanation that was still unaware that it was requesting one. In my
Take, for example, my reconstruction last night of the conversation I had yesterday afternoon with one of my friends. We met, as he and I always do, in a café downtown, and while drinking our coffee, we began our dialogue by casually exchanging comments about a movie that had been shown on television the evening before and that we both had happened to see. It was a conventional movie, mere entertainment laced with a few pretensions that did not fool us in the least. My friend and I share the unobjectionable habit of watching banal shows on television at night in order to relax. We also share a distaste for those so-called “cultural” programs that are shown so widely on cable channels. Th e fact is, the situation of a man of culture is symmetrically inverse to that of the common citizen, who — after a day of prosaic and practical activities — turns on the television set in search of some spiritual elevation. On the contrary, for those of us who have spent our day in the company of Hegel or Dostoyevsky, such “cultural” programs are a waste of time, and for this same reason, as well as their intrinsic worthlessness, we find them paltry and narrow-minded, if not downright ridiculous.
We’d both seen only fragments of this movie; due to tedium and channel surfing as well as domestic distractions, we’d seen different parts, one of us more at the beginning and the other more at the end. But that was enough; stereotypical Hollywood productions of this kind can be fully deduced from one or two scenes, the same way paleontologists can reconstruct an entire dinosaur out of a single vertebra. If one keeps watching, it is only to confirm what one already knows, a confirmation that, difficult as this may be to admit, brings its own satisfaction.
So, we understood each other’s comments. Something so trivial, of course, did not call for much commentary on our part, and none would have been made had I not mentioned, with a smile, a fairly gross error that the producers had made. It was as follows: the protagonist, a humble goatherd in the Ukraine . . . was wearing a Rolexwatch! I burst out laughing when I said it, and when remembering it in bed, a smile surely spread across my face. In the act of doing both things — laughing in reality and smiling upon remembering it — I realized that the blank expression on my friend’s face was of someone who doesn’t understand what he is hearing. Here it is appropriate to add an aside: a memory can be identical to what is being remembered; at the same time, it is different, without ceasing to be the same. My friend’s look of incomprehension, which I saw while sitting across from him at the small table in the café, was precisely that: a request for an explanation that was still unaware that it was requesting one. In my
Similar Books
