I remember / je me souviens

I remember / je me souviens

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For those limbic bursts of nostalgia, invented by Proust, miniaturized by Nicholson Baker, and freeze-dried by Joe Brainard in his I remember and by Georges Perec in his Je me souviens.

But there are no fractions, the world is an integer
Like us, and like us it can neither stand wholly apart nor disappear.
When one is young it seems like a very strange and safe place,
But now that I have changed it feels merely odd, cold
And full of interest.
--John Ashbery, "A Wave"

Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
--Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

Wednesday, March 20, 2002

I remember Daphne du Maurier's The House on the Strand. It was a novel from the hallucinogenic age -- on my parents' bookshelf near Ulysses and near The Loving Couple -- the hero takes hallucinogens and somehow meets some virtual people, or people of another time, down outside the house on the strand where he is living. I loved the idea (as I loved my favorite Atom comic strip, when The Atom actually gets so small that he enters the world that exists on an atom and gets involved in some of the Golden Bough cultural anthropological otherness of the beings there), but I could never get very far into the book.

posted by william 5:06 PM
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