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

Friday, May 17, 2002

I remember my toy shaving kit. I used to watch my father shave in the mornings -- an elaborate ritual it seemed to me -- and he got me a shaving kit which had a toy safety razor, a plastic bowl, and a brush. I used to put on his shaving cream (always Noxema) and shave it off with the razor. (I had no idea that real razors were sharp.) I was puzzled by the brush and the bowl, although I didn't ever ask anybody about it. My cantankerous grandfather (downtown) urged me not to want to start shaving too early. He said that I would stimulate my beard's growth, and that once you start having to shave it quickly loses its luster, and you have to do it for the rest of your life. He regreted starting too early. A couple of times since I preferred a beard, but he was right about how old it gets. Still, I think he had a different sense of time than I do (mine seems to be the minority sense, judging from what other people say): he regreted time wasted on chores in the distant past, and as far as I'm concerned the regret seems empty: past is past, and the fact that I've beenshaving say six months longer than I needed to have been doesn't seem to have any importance to my attitude towards it now. I used to be puzzled about whether somehow I was missing some sense of duration -- some possession of the thread of my own life -- that it would be far better to have. I've since used a shaving bowl, though, on trips where I didn't want to take cans of shaving cream, and they are a pain.

posted by william 6:51 AM
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