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

Wednesday, July 03, 2002

I remember two knife-sharpeners in the kitchen drawers. One was a cylindrical piece of metal on a standard wooden grip. I had no idea what it was used for, but I had no idea what a lot of kitchen implements were used for. The other was also on a standard grip, but it had a slotted wheel on a bearing that the knife set spinning. I remember that my mother would often whet a knife on the first -- the cylindrical -- sharpener before carving meat. I don't think I ever saw the second one -- which seemed dangerous to me, the way can-openers seem dangerous -- being used. Because at that time door-to-door knife-sharpeners still came, and I remember one coming with his machine and sharpening all our knives. You could also see knife-sharpeners on the street, with their carts, or one at least, whom I remember on 92nd street. I remember seeing sparks fly, but I don't know whether this was in our apartment or on the street.

posted by william 8:33 AM
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