Through The Looking Glass: Learning How to Remember
By Madeline Killen | May 30, 2018Last week, when I learned that Philip Roth had died, I searched my Notes app for the line from “American Pastoral” that I’d copied down last spring: “And since we don’t just forget things because they don’t matter but also forget things because they matter too much ... each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprint...” I was sitting on the grass outside of the River apartments on one of those first warm days of spring when being anywhere except in the sun felt like a sin, and I remember reading that line and thinking that it put into words something that I’d always known without knowing.