Aletheia

I finished reading The Women's Room a couple of days ago. It was part of a reading list that grew out of our 50th Reunion - books that were written in that time, about that time, by authors of our time. The Group, The Class, You Can Always Tell A Harvard Man, Pitch Uncertain, I Remember Nothing, The Red Book, A Sense of an Ending, an article entitled Harvard and the Making of the Unibomber.  Three other friends and I are reading and talking about these books in preparation for a writing project of our own.


Because I have been away from Cambridge for 50 years, and away from friends there, I have lost much of that context for memory, and so I think I remember much less than my friends do. We keep memory alive by memory; telling stories, comparing notes, seeing places, writing it down, taking photographs and then looking at them, living in the context of the memorable events. I have done very little of that - I would say none, but I know there are one or two exceptions, but I didn't let them get large enough to build a context to live in. This idea of context isn't my own - I read it somewhere in those books in the list above. Maybe I'll remember where, or one of my friends will have noted it as well.


I read The Women's Room years ago, soon after it was published, but as I reread it this week, I only recalled the first few pages. Maybe I didn't finish it back then, I don't remember. The women in the book were about a half a generation older than me, and seemed to be more mired in pre-women's lib that I ever felt. Maybe identification builds context for memory. I was wrapped in myself for years and years, and find myself at 72 searching for both memory and identification. 


From The Women's Room: "You know, the Greek word for truth - aletheia - doesn't mean the opposite of falsehood. It means the opposite of lethe, oblivion. Truth is what is remembered."


That's what is important. Memory, not oblivion. Even if the memory is false, as it is sure to be sometimes, it is not oblivion.