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

Tuesday, April 02, 2002

I remember tables of logarithms. They looked so cool at the end of my pink Review Text of Eleventh Grade Mathematics, which I was trying to read in sixth grade. I remember also trying to learn about square roots (and the "carat method" of finding them) and simultaneous equations from my bright orange Britannica Jr. Encyclopedia, which came as a bonus for my parents' Encyclopedia. (Almost everybody else in my school used World Book.) I didn't get very far.

I remember slide rules. My father had a beautiful wooden one, which he gave me, but I preferred my plastic one with more scales on it. I loved the hairline clear plastic indicator. I think the indicator was gone from his, which of course didn't matter, but still.

I remember that at that time people with abacuses were still supposed to be faster than people with mechanical adding machines.

posted by william 12:19 PM
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