Sunny Disposish...

Oliver Sach's new New Yorker piece, "The Abyss," the story of a severely amnesic English gentleman, is a must read. Not only does it plummet into the many meanings of memory and how, when it's working, it serves to create a continuous reality for us, but it also, quite inadvertently, offers an uproariously accurate "diagnosis" of a certain, classic British bonhomie - a chatty, upbeat self-possession, a loquacious worldview as ordered and uninterrupted as a song bird or symphonic music. It is something I've always found to be extremely charming and fascinating. I referred to it as Wilberforce Syndrome, after one Bertram Wilberforce "Bertie" Wooster, but of course it can take several forms.