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

Friday, September 20, 2002

I remember when apples had worms in them. Macs, especially (there were only two kinds -- macs which actually tasted good, and Delicious which actually were firm and sweet. No longer). They had worm-holes, and you tried to dig the holes out. Sometimes you'd taste something bitter, and there would be a brown serpentine section in the apple that I thought (and still think) was the worm itself somehow digested and assimilated into the apple it was trying to eat. I remember that the only thing worse than finding a worm was finding half a worm. Each half was supposed to regenerate, and if you ate half, it was supposed to regenerate in your stomach. I don't think I ever really worried about this -- rather it was a fact one knew.

posted by william 1:59 PM
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