Six Scenes of Instruction in Stanley Cavell’s Little Did I Know

Stanley Cavell’s memoir, Little Did I Know, ends with an enigmatic conversation at his father’s hospital bedside entitled “To put away—perhaps not to discard—childish things.” Published responses to Little Did I Know have left the ending unexamined, which means we are still some distance from understanding the book as a whole. In this essay I read the ending alongside several other key episodes in the text as “scenes of instruction,” a term essential to Cavell’s account of Wittgenstein. Doing so helps make sense not just of the memoir but of its place in Cavell’s work.