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, September 19, 2002

I remember that I had a canary when I was very young named (I think) Hans. I mainly remember that he died. I remember talking about the canary that I used to have with my parents better than I remember the canary. I think I had him a year.

I remember a parakeet flying through our window into our apartment on Riverside Drive. I wanted to keep it, but of course we didn't. My father took it to the ASPCA. "We don't take birds," they said. "You do now," he said, and left it with them.

I remember that my uptown grandmother made me chocolate farina that she called papi-papi. I loved it. I even liked its occasional lumpiness, because you could never tell if a lump would be farinesque or intensely chocolatey.

posted by william 7:11 AM
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