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, July 04, 2002

I remember how much I liked the mysterious title "The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds." The play alas turned out to be disappointing. I liked the equally thrilling title -- a sort of rhythmic and semantic rhyme of the first -- of Julian Jayne's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. (Proust in Jean Santeuil I later read describes a teacher of Jean's whose books have thrilling but then self-deflating titles, like Le sentiment de l'infini sur les bords du Lac du Tchad.)

posted by william 1:25 AM
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