The Rememberer

by Aimee Bender

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 1997

About the author

Aimee Bender is the author of the novel An Invisible Sign of My Own and of the collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures. Her work has been widely anthologized and has been translated into ten languages. She lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

[Simone Torn]

This story made me start crying in class. Like I had to leave the room because I was so emotional. Aimee is the best writer ever

[tortoise dreams]

A woman's lover, Ben, a sad, thoughtful man, begins to devolve, "experiencing reverse evolution," becoming regressively an ape, a sea turtle, a salamander.

Story Review: "The Rememberer" is a very short story that seeks to open up the world, to provoke thoughts, ideas, wonder. Bender makes little effort to direct our understanding of the story, encouraging free ranging thoughts about it. Ben says, "We're all getting too smart ... there's too much thought and not enough heart ... we think far too much." It's true, humans were never meant to be this smart, no animal was meant to have so much effect on the world. We have created weapons that can make the world uninhabitable, we pollute the entire planet, we destroy ourselves even as we wipe out other species. The narrator goes to a college to consult an "old biology teacher," but science is not the answer, science has no answers, providing equally destructive remedies till it's just an inaccurate mess. We are not the crown of creation, but have "become death, the destroyer of worlds." Perhaps one answer to the sorrow this future causes, is to go in a different direction, become less human, to defect from the breed of destruction. But this devolution is also suicide (is "The Rememberer" a parable about sadness and suicide -- perhaps, but maybe not). As Ben becomes progressively less human, he is less Ben, less the being that the narrator has a connection to, until she has to just let him go (hmmm, back to the suicide parable ... ?). Although we are a horribly destructive race, with no end of massive crimes against humanity and the planet, it is also, unredeemable as we are, who we are and all we've got. Able to provoke thoughts and emotions. [5★]

[kt]

“I cannot bear to look down into the water and not be able to find him at all, to search the tiny waves with a microscope lens and to locate my lover, the one-celled wonder, bloated and blind, brainless, benign, heading clear and small, like an eye-floater into nothingness.”

read this again and sobbed! because every other paragraph of this short story is just absolutely gut wrenching!

[Liv]

"I sat down. I remembered how the first time we had sex, I left the lights on, kept my eyes wide open and concentrated really hard on letting go; then I noticed that his eyes were open too and in the middle of taking off my clothes we sat down on the floor and had an hour-long conversation about poetry. It was all very peculiar. It was all very familiar."

I read this in preparation for one of my classes today and have never felt so affected by the progression of a short story. The quote above captures what I believe to be the essence of this story and all it represents. Our desire to conquer everything through the pursuit of knowledge is effectively drying up our emotional capabilities and inhibiting our ability to connect to those around us. Only through our connections can we continue on whilst sustainably gathering knowledge at a pace that allows for replinishing.

[kylie]

This story brings a whole new meaning to "would you still love me if I was a worm".

This feels a lot like after a break up and you've deleted all your pictures and given them their things back. Did they ever exist in the first place? Was it all made up? All you have left is the memories.

[Nicole Hidalgo]

"Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries up and dies when there’s too much thought and not enough heart."

[mena ౨ৎ]

read this for my creative writing class and it made me so emotional what

[Sam Kipper]

This is why I love to read

[yağmur]

oh god i wanna cry

[ryan]

cute!

[Teona Janae]

shoutout to the true yearner!!!

[Cady Barlow]

3 pages 2/3

[Emma]

"I cannot bear to look down into that water and not be able to find him at all." :(

[Charlotte Cowley]

This is a 10 minute short story which is very poignantly written.