I thought this short story, “Blushes,” by Graham Swift, in The New Yorker, January 18 2021, was tremendous as a statement of quiet competence in writing, on a well-trodden theme: towards the end of life, looking back and having a childhood memory stick. (Rosebud?) Every human, one imagines, over a certain age is familiar with this sentiment, and one can imagine more clearly, when confronted with writing like this, what it would mean to not have these kinds of memory flashes. The sense of continuity constructed by the brain: “that self was myself, even as it was a different self,” is arguably one of our most mysterious human traits. Some commentary over at Mookse.