Day 3: "Mere Belief"
Sallie Tisdale (Harper's Magazine, November 2023)
In this twenty-two-day series, we are counting down the days to publication (October 22, 2024) with a brief passage from each of the twenty-two essays included in The Best American Essays 2024. These excerpts were curated by Best American Essays Editorial Assistant Cheyenne Paterson and are presented in the order of the volume’s table of contents.
“I know that I took swimming lessons, but I don’t remember them—I just remember being able to swim. Freud said of the confusion of memories he encountered in analysis: ‘It is difficult to find one’s way about in this.’ In crucial ways we are made before age ten. So the conundrum appears: How can I possibly know who I was? I can’t, and yet I do.”
—Sallie Tisdale, “Mere Belief,” Harper’s Magazine, November 2023.