philip sherburne

My favorite single image from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I think, occurs in the Barnes and Noble, where Joel and Clementine have one of their many meetings in his memory-space. In one of the subtly disorienting details of the film, all of the books have been placed on the shelves with their spines to the wall, and the room swims with the dazzling white-out of the hundreds of thousands of pages as they reflect the light, erasing all context in a burst of anonymity.

Intentional or not, the image reminds me of Rachel Whiteread's marvelous (and much contested) Memorial to the Victims of the Holocaust at Judenplatz in Vienna. Typical of Whitread, that memorial presents the stone cast of a library that's been turned inside out; what seems at first a classical mass of bricks turns out to be shelf after shelf of books facing outward, their pages weathering the elements, each fossilized page a micro-memorial in constant peril of the erosion of forgetting.