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

Thursday, May 30, 2002

I remember that at Cake Masters there were large brass globes of string hanging from the ceiling, with the string coming down within reach of the counter-workers. When they closed a box they would pull the string and tie up the box deftly and rapidly, snipping it with scissors. If you got a box of cookies, it was very hard to open it up without undoing the string. I would try to slip it off so that I could slip it back on unperceived, but it was usually too tight, and it would cut into or crush the cardboard. And I could never just untie the string, because I couldn't retie it.

posted by william 7:10 AM
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