Sites, Sights, and Silences of Memory what we make of it. When I went back to two documents: and Sellers & Yeatman's J066 Eugen Weber Memory was asked is what we make it. Memory Memory, is I to talk about Sites of Pierre Nora's great monument first to the subject, and All includes That. Les Lieux de Memoire, in case you don't know, consists of seven volumes, the of which came out in 1984, the last in 1992, and it 4710 pages and 155 essays by 106 contributors. J 066 came out in 1931 and its subtitle reads A Memorable History of England, comprising all the points you can remember, including 103 good things, 5 bad kings, and 2 genuine dates. The dates are 55 BC when the Romans invaded England and 1066 when the Normans landed at Hastings. The Norman Conquest was a Good Thing, as from that time on England stopped being conquered and thus was able to become top nation. The book is 1 16 pages long, including five test papers with questions like: Which came first, AD or BC? (be careful) What is a Plantagenet? Do you agree? Gunpowder Plot. Deplore the failure of the And so on. We have here two conflicting approaches to memorable memory, and I But if serious subjects deserve to be treated seriously (sometimes). Sellers & Yeatman also make a serious point that has often been made more pretentiously and at greater length: that memory is what you remember, but also misremember, invent, are told or taught. It shall not try to reconcile them. becomes part of our mind's furniture and that of the society or social groups in which we move, a symbolic capital of commonalities, commonplaces, cliches that acquire significance and force by being held in common, that mold a particular idiom of the mind, that act as passwords and as bonds (remember that this is what religio means). There are, of course, memories madeleines, if you like. But that function as personal and private affairs these only become significant when they go public: when they are shared with a friend, a lover, an audience, after which they also operate as bonds and identifiers to initiates until, precisely as in the case of Proust's madeleine, they enter the baggage, and the flow, of public memory. To a historian, events, doings, lives matter as part of a public story. Most of the time, the personal and private counts when it ceases to be per- sonal and private and becomes part of the public sphere. And all, or almost