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, June 11, 2002

I remember how much I hated soft-boiled eggs. We had light blue (robin's-egg blue!) egg cups. My uptown grandfather liked three-minute eggs -- he'd place them in the egg-cup, crack them on top with a little egg-spoon, just a bit larger than a demi-tasse spoon, with some sort of scroll lattice work on the handle, and scoop them out. Every few months or so I'd emulate him, seeking to like this elegant ritual. But I never could. The egg-white was ok, if a little bit wobbly, but when I got to the hot yolk I just couldn't make myself acquire a taste for it. I think that I somehow felt very American when Silly Putty came out (or when I first heard of it -- I loved the way it could pick up comics) because it came in an egg-shaped container but what was inside was as wonderfully different from a soft-boiled egg as could be; and the container itself opened lengthwise without that mildly disturbing cracked and collapsing crown that I always produced by tapping on the top of the egg.

posted by william 10:13 AM
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