If we are cursed to forget much of what we read, there are still charms in the moments of reading a particular book in a particular place. What I remember most about Malamud’s short-story collection “The Magic Barrel” is the warm sunlight in the coffee shop on the consecutive Friday mornings I read it before high school. That is missing the more important points, but it is something. Reading has many facets, one of which might be the rather indescribable, and naturally fleeting, mix of thought and emotion and sensory manipulations that happen in the moment and then fade.
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The Curse of Reading and Forgetting – The New Yorker
I would connect this blogpost to the essays of a film writer who described the experience of watching the film in the cinema in more detail than the film itself. Unfortunately (and perhaps fittingly) I can’t remember her name.
