I’ve been thinking about lists— particularly the lists one is asked to assemble after the death of a loved one. The legal system frequently requests an “inventory” of the items which belonged to the loved one, a list of things which can be contested by beneficiaries and inheritants.

Lists have their silences. I did not include my mothers’ shoes in the inventory of her estate. But my mother loved shoes; she preserved her 30-year-old boots from Romania carefully in her closet. The boots were useless in Alabama, where sorority girls sport Uggs with shorts all over campuses that never see snow. Why did my mother keep those boots near the black heels she wore to work?

Is silence listed or unlisted? I don’t know.

In contemporary memoir, in the industry of unpacking wounds, silence often appears as the enemy, the erasure one writes against. Silence is violence, and the text serves as indictment. But silence is also protective, a way of preserving the sacred, a way of acknowledging the unsayable. Marguerite Duras hints at this in her “Letter to Centro Racchi,” where she bows out of an invitation to speak at conference, due to fear of being asked a question which would ruin a silence central to her life.

Duras fears being asked why her characters are always Jewish, a question she cannot answer; the possibility of speakers or audience members theorizing on an answer to what feels unanswerable, the chance " that someone might tell me why" is "intolerable" to her. She speculates that silence is what binds her and her characters to Jewishness—"We keep silent together and that makes the book."

Waking up at 16 to a world that included disaster, Duras says:

"What happened to me in between, the war, the children, love, everything fades. The Jews remain. Which I cannot speak about."

"I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.....for it runs in my head we shall all die young.."

[ John Keats to Charles Brown, 30 Nov. 1820]

In court, this refusal to defend oneself is often interpreted as an admission of guilt. To refuse to satisfy the answers of others is to deny the world's claim on justice, or to complicate its relation to reality. More than anything, silence challenges our ways of knowing the world. And a kept silence, an impermeable, living silence, cuts off our access to the sacred, or that which is set apart.

Excerpt from Ryan Bradley’s “The Lost List” (as found in *Best American Essays 2022*, edited by Alexander Chee)

I love Ryan Bradley’s essay, “The Lost List,” which touches on the inventory of absences compiled by the mind. It prompts notebooks.

Reading Bradley, I thought of Judith Schalansky’s marvelous book, An Inventory of Losses (translated by Jackie Smith). In it, Schalansky invokes what archivists know, namely: "chronology—the allocation of sequential numbers for each new addition--is in its banal logic the most unoriginal of all organizational principles, being only a simulation of order," as "the world is a sprawling archive of itself."

The world is a sprawling archive of itself. Everything depends on what is selected as worth remembering. Or what it determined to be forgettable. What we consecrate with legend.

Joan of Arc's trial is notable for its silences —- she is, after all, being tried for heresy against a god administered by rulers, or the power of those on the podium.

And she responds with refusals: "I won't answer that.... Even fire won't change my mind..... The voice has forbidden me”—-the voice being God; fire being the way she would die, condemned for relapsing into heresy, exposed to a public recitation of her countless sins, and the response: silence. Like suicide.