The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Sunday, September 29, 2024

Diary: I remember the earliest days of the CD player–too well, really. I was in college, working my part-time job as a check-casher for one of the Money Centers’ branches, this one in Brooklyn on 36th Street across from the Greenwood Cemetery, where I was usually assigned. I’d sometimes listen to music on my walkman, when the manager Gene’s radio didn’t blare WNEW’s Make Believe Ballroom too loud. I’d listen to WNCN, a classical station back then (it has since become the call letters of a television station in the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, where I ended up living for three years), and during one of those listens I remember the host describing how a CD player worked, what it looked like, what a CD looked like, how it spun at an incredible speed, and how well it sounded. This was the early 1980s, when we needed every distraction from the Reagan administration’s rueful buggeries. Back then they still played mostly vinyl records. The host would then announce a CD piece with fanfare every time he (they were all hees) had one to announce, the way TV stations thought color programs were the next-best thing to walking on the moon. Then very quickly records disappeared and we had to rebuild or “record” collections with CDs, to the delight of music producers. Over the years Cheryl and I must’ve accumulated over 1,000, which isn’t much compared to most music buffs’ collections. But for the last many years, with every CD digitized and accessible by computer, they’ve just sat there, taking up space, gathering the dust of our shed skins. But the CDs had themselves become shed skin. The other day I threw them all in bins and bags and stashed them in the car to eventually donate them to the Friends of the Library, who could at least get a buck for each, or even 50 cents, and raise a good treasure. It’s part of that cleaning we should all do (that some of us are doing) as we approach our own excavation from this world. Save our children the trouble. But the more I looked at the CDs, the more I wanted to keep some of them. So I looked as little as possible, and still ended up with a small tower’s worth–a Billy Joel double-album from the 1980s, cracked of course, my first St. John Passion on CD (nowhere near the quality of the vinyl version by Karl Richter) the Queen double-album that became the soundtrack of a particular summer in West Virginia in the early 1990s, when a Turkish exchange student and I became friends, the Handel suites for keyboard (Keith Jarrey playing) that I played every day when I stalked Cheryl in Lakeland (it took her several months to agree to a date), Madonna’s Immaculate Collection from the late 80s, shreds of another girlfriend. On it goes: memory (“which is life itself,” Saul Bellow wrote) can be a dangerous thing when fueled with music, like certain smells that trigger an era, sights that trigger an abyss, tastes that trigger a Big Bang. Like Proust’s madeleine. Every CD a dip into a past so far gone, you can begin to taste your own end of the universe. That ironic silence, when the music stops. Or else it can weary one’s audience: “In writing one’s personal reminiscences it is not always easy to discriminate between one’s self and one’s audience, and the peril of prolixity lies in wait for the writer who begins his first paragraph with ‘I remember,’” Edith Wharton warned. I should have heeded her warning 40 lines ago. 

—P.T.

 

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Even now, To remember that time fills me with a choking, hopeless sensation. Everything was terrible. People offered me cold drinks, extra sweaters, food I couldn’t eat: bananas, cupcakes, club sandwiches, ice cream. I said yes and no when I was spoken to, and spent a lot of time staring at the carpet so people wouldn’t see I’d been crying. 

—From Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (2013).

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.