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

Saturday, August 03, 2002

I remember how long an hour used to be. Having to wait an hour for something was intolerable. Having an hour to do something was to have as much time as you could possibly need. Once at home in apartment 2-G I remember asking the housekeeper how long it would be before my parents came home, and she said that it would be an hour. I think this was the first time I had a sense of how long that was. I stood next to the refrigerator in the darkening kitchen, sometimes peeping around it at the kitchen, sometimes stepping back to look at the clock above it. I strummed my fingers on the warm coils on its back. After I was sure an hour had passed, it turned out that only five minutes had gone by. Hours just seemed like currency too large to be trading in.

posted by william 6:15 AM
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