You want et cetera? I'll give you et cetera.

Last night's dinner was fresh pappardelle with a sauce that was just carmelized onions with cherry plum tomatoes cut in half and sauteed with the onions very quickly at the end, with a little basil. I expected it to taste Italian, but for some reason it reminded me of England. I don't think that this could be because it was in some way "English food" -- it must be because it had some strong taste in common with some particular thing I ate, maybe many times, some time when I was staying with my grandparents in Suffolk. But even while that association was instantly and immediately obvious, the actual occasion and even the dish were completely unavailable. Oh, that wonderful, crazy, mysterious mechanism that is memory.

So now I am reminded of a conversation some of us were having about memory-related constraints on anaphoric reference (probably if you don't know what I mean, you don't really want to know). After lots of solid discussion of precise quantitative this-and-that which seemed to explain a lot of things in a nice, solid, satisfying, definite way, one of us said, "But, I mean, what is memory, anyway?" And of course the answer is that no one knows. And even though we all knew that, there was something about coming to that point after that kind of conversation that made it extra remarkable. Now, of course, having written this out, I see that this experience doesn't translate well at all, but there you have it, anyhow.

Posted by redfox at September 27, 2002 04:07 PM (etcetera)

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