Samuel Johnson Is Indignant by Lydia Davis Page A

woods with friends looking for mushrooms that may make happy memories. There have been a few times of gardening together as a family that may make a good happy memory. Working together at some arduous cooking one evening is a happy memory so far. There was a good trip out to a department store. Sitting by the bedside of someone who was dying may actually make a good happy memory. My mother and I once carried a piece of coal on a train to Newcastle together. My mother and I once played cards with some longshoremen on a snowy morning waiting for a ship to come in. There was a time when I lived in a foreign city and returned again and again to a certain botanical garden to look at a certain Cedar of Lebanon, and that is a happy memory, even though I was alone. My neighbor across the street once brought a plate of cake to the back door during a time of mourning. But I can see that if some day she and I were to become estranged, that would spoil the happy memory. I see that happy memories can be erased. A happy memory can be erased if you do the same thing on another day and you are not happy, for instance if on another day you garden or cook together with bad feeling. I can see that an experience does not make a happy memory if it started out well but ended badly. There is no happy memory if there was something nice about an experience but also some problem, if two of you enjoyed an outing but the third was sitting at home angry because you were so late returning. You have to make sure, somehow, that nothing spoils the thing while it is happening, and then that no later experience erases it. I could have happy memories. I can see that the things I do with another person, and with a feeling of warmth toward that person, and with a person who will want to have me in his or her happy memory may make a good happy memory, while the things I do alone and especially with a feeling of ambition, or pride, or power, even if they are good in themselves, will not make a good happy memory. It is all right to have candy and enjoy it, but I should remember that the memory of candy will not be a happy one. If I am playing a board game with people close to me and we are happy, I must be sure we don’t quarrel before the end of it. I must be sure that at some later time we don’t play another board game that is unhappy. I should check now and then to make sure I am not alone too much, or unhappy with other people too often. I should add them up, now and then: what are my happy memories so far?

They Take Turns Using a Word they Like
    â€œIt’s extraordinary ,” says one woman.
    â€œIt is extraordinary,” says the other.

Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman
    Preface
    Woman of pride, passion, and labor, who was actress of her time because she had the ambition of her means and the means of her ambition, actress of ours, finally, since between Marie and atomic force, the filiation is direct.
    Besides, she died of it.
    Character
    From birth, Marie possesses the three dispositions that make brilliant subjects, cherished by professors: memory, power of concentration, and appetite for learning.
    â€œMy heart breaks when I think of my spoiled aptitudes which, all the same, had to be worth something…”
    Then what? The “ordinary destiny of women”? She never imagined making it her own.
    In the Chalet of Zakopane
    But in the chalet of Zakopane where she lingers, alone, in September 1891, walking her melancholy under the great black pines of the Carpathians, dragging a grippe that does not finish, one man, Casimir, could take her away. And a part of herself hopes.
    In two months she will be twenty-four years.
    She is poor. She is not yet beautiful. For all diploma she has the Polish baccalaureate. Why would she become “someone”? Besides, she loves Casimir, and waits for him.
    Four years have not cooled the sentiments of the young man, probably exalted on the contrary by the obstacle…And he has lost nothing