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, August 22, 2002

I remember the last cobblestones in New York. I think there were some in Inwood, around Dykeman Street, and there were some near 180th street, and I think there was a large stretch of them on the gigantic hill up 165th street that we would take from Riverside Drive to go to my uptown grandparents' apartment. Eventually they paved over them, and now they may all be removed, but for a while in New York cobblestones would show through deteriorating macadam. (I remember how beautiful and somehow old-fashioned and friendly, with curves down from their crowns like a fifties car, the black streets looked in the rain.) When we learned about Peter Stuyvesant and New Amsterdam, the cobblestones seemed a link to that past. Later, when I visited Stuyvesant Village, the modern high-rises seemed wrong. My Uncle went to Stuyvesant, and I remember visiting it once, in elementary school, but not finding the list of war dead with his name (my name) inscribed on it.

I remember that stoopis a Dutch word, used only in New York.

posted by william 10:03 AM
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