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

Monday, September 09, 2002

I remember a fireman coming to our school (P.S. 166) and telling us horrendous stories about stupid children who died because they didn't know what to do in a fire. (One nine-year-old girl, he said, got in the shower, but luckily her brother called the Operator and said, "My sister's on fire!" I remember that she was older than me, so I must have been seven or eight. Someone else dropped a cigarette in a couch and it caught fire in the middle of the night. And some kid blew his heel off stomping on an aeresol can.) I remember he warned us against false alarms, and said that some of them were under surveillance, because false alarms killed. I couldn't really figure out how they did, but then decided it must have been because a certain number of fire trucks moving through the streets at great speed crashed, and every time you set off a false alarm there was a chance of a useless crash. So everytime I saw a firetruck passing by, I hoped it wouldn't crash. I wonder whether I ever saw, then, some of the firefighters who later as upper management, in their fifties and sixties, were killed in the World Trade Center.

posted by william 5:08 PM
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