It was the act of imagining herself as she had once been that enriched her syntax and extended not only her images but the coherent flow of association that led directly into the task at hand.

The better the speaker imagined herself, the more vividly she brought the dead doctor to life. It was, after all, a baptism by fire that was being described. To see her ambitious young self burning to know what her mentor knew, we had to see the mentor as well: an agent of threat and promise: a figure of equal complexity.

The eulogist is flooded with confusion. She realizes suddenly that what she’s been calling experience is only raw material.

Now she starts thinking. Who exactly was the doctor to her? Or she to the doctor? And what does it mean, having known her? What does she want this remembrance to exemplify? or embody? or invoke? What is it that she is really wanting to say?

We’d realize the writer is struggling to make sense of feelings whose complexity he acknowledges. The struggle alone would have made the subject vital.

When Rousseau observes, “I have nothing but myself to write about, and this self that I have, I hardly know of what it consists,” he is saying to the reader, “I will go in search of it in your presence. I will set down on the page a tale of experience just as I think it occurred, and together we’ll see what it exemplifies, both of us discovering as I write this self I am in search of.” And that was the beginning of memoir as we know it.

The writing continues to dazzle while the structure falls apart. And rightly so. Because, after all, what difference does it really make—the second and third times around—which comes first? We are in the presence of a man in a trance of self-analysis: a man who will never act on what he knows and therefore is compelled to go on “knowing.