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

Wednesday, October 23, 2002

From Richard Moran:

"I remember how much my fingers used to pucker up in the bathtub. Why don't they do that anymore? Or do I just not notice it?"

Maybe this only happens to children for some reason. I remember noting this as a child, and my pet name for it at the time was that my fingers had become "blind". I would hold them up and show them to whoever was around, sometimes one of my brothers, saying "See? My fingers are blind!" The family got a kick out of that. --Richard Moran

posted by william 1:54 PM
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