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, June 28, 2002

I remember carrying my books to school in a briefcase -- one of a series of my parents' old briefcases. (I remember the leather cracking, and its smell.) The cool kids had attache cases instead. And the somehow really cool kids -- or cool in a different way -- had elastic rubber belts or straps that held their books together, and they just carried them under their arms. The straps seemed mysterious to me until finally I got one, and then they turned out to be not mysterious at all, which was slightly disappointing. I don't think you can get them any more -- now everyone uses backpacks, which the kids who had been using straps were the first to take up, in my school at least.

posted by william 7:13 AM
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