What is hope, in the end, but the antipodal twin of memory? A bright mirage projected on the clouds ahead, like a distorted image of the mirages cast on the clouds behind. We spend our lives framed, hemmed in by these dense fog banks, rarely realizing we’re alive in the sunlit space between. Or we’re like drivers at night, barely registering a never-heard-before song on the speakers or the sleep breathing of the passenger beside us as we squint ahead to where our high beams diffuse into fog, fearing a collision or watching for a sign, then checking the rearview yet again, ruminating on the rose-lit or blood-lit dimness behind. A prudent protocol for driving, maybe, but no way to live.
If you look at a map of Paris, you will see very plainly that Shakespeare and Company is ridiculously close to Notre-Dame. Right across the Seine. All you have to do is walk over a little overpass, which is to say the two are basically right across the street from one another. Google Maps clocks it at less than a 6-minute walk, door to door. (In my defense, we opted not to get the roaming data plan. I was on my own.) I spent a good half hour circling Notre-Dame, wandering off into side streets, utterly incapable of locating what was, to me, the second-most important thing to find in Paris. (The first was baguettes. I found those, no problem.)
I know this is going to sound so cheesy, but I swear it’s true: then I heard music. A lone violin! It was playing “Hallelujah,” which was my favorite song (which is to say I watched a lot of Shrek as a kid). I followed the sound, and then there it was: Shakespeare and Company, in all its glory.
What will be the next grand metaphor about the brain? Impossible to say, because we need to wait for the next world-changing technology. But in the mean time, Cobb suggests, the computer metaphor might be doing more harm than good. After all, he notes rightly: “Metaphors shape our ideas in ways that are not always helpful.”
“The world of reviewing is small,” says the sociologist Phillipa K. Chong, author of Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times, and there is an unintended double meaning here. A critic has to write with some confidence and posture, but there is always the worry: Who cares?
admiral – when we came ashore the day before
the prostitutes – learning we had returned from the war
greeted us as if we had risen from the dead