Our proper bliss depends on what we blame.

No more use to me. I remember London firemen pouring great gouts of water on a flaming hoarding while a whole wall went up beside them as if that other burning were some sort of social gaffe which ought to be ignored. I remember the hours I spent with my children collecting butterflies—the immense . . . relief it was—but why? I scarcely know the difference, now, between an admiral and a painted lady, and when they flutter from flower to flower in the garden, they rarely detain my eye. No more use . . . than the hollow of the inner thigh . . . to me . . . to me . . . that delicious muscle shiver.

Ah, yes, why remember . . . well,

(1) to match a past perception with a present image: Martha, hungry, mouthing my mouth as if it were an ice >< Martha rubbing a bit of lipstick from her teeth with the tip of a paper towel;

(2) to make tolerable a painful present with some pleasant recollections, such as thinking of Lou while screwing the wife;

(3) to entertain friends, because even the war is wonderful and funny as a story, and all my army buddies—those callous louts who made my mind crawl the way gunfire pressed my chest into the mud—they are cute cartoons and funny figures now: cronies of consciousness;

(4) to compile and order grievances, preserve insults, register slights and injuries, to husband hate;

(5) to number, name, and know by naming, to characterize, stereotype, sterilize, to poison the mind with a phrase, to be able to say of Marty that she has a codfishy caze . . . a codfishy caze . . . a codfishy caze;

(6) to retain a desired identity, to support our vision of ourselves as Julian Sorel or Saint the Joanie, the Count of Monte Cristo, Casanova, Mother Courage . . . ei! . . . Huckleberry Finn, or, in my case, the Hector Berlioz of History; and

(7) to share and compound a self, so that the isolation of the ego can be disguised as a joint venture, the way married people imagine they remember a common past (our porous apartment in Indiana, for instance), or Germans believe they share the same Frederick (and possess his greatness), or can look back together, proudly, at Barbarossa; and this is why the memory must be trained not to fetch up a disabling image, but must be lapdogged, and why history is so important to the vanity of nations.

. . . first Zeus begot Remembrance by stealth: in the guise or her own gaze he enveloped her fair body from the inside of a mirror; next Meditation was brought to birth by buggery, though the god entered slowly, with a phallus suitably reduced; then, finally, Song was several times engendered by spitting in the mother’s mouth—the spit, however, of a god . . .