Exercícios de memória

In our decrepitude, we remember but one word in ten thousand.

So runs an entry in a commonplace book that I began keeping in the early 1990s, as a nondecrepit twentysomething. The mere act of transcription has brought this sentence to mind countless times in the past twenty-five years. It’s a line about forgetting that itself refuses to be forgotten, as though its syllables contain the antidote to oblivion.