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

Saturday, October 12, 2002

I remember going out one evening in Bellagio for pizza up on the square that you reached by climbing the winding cobblestone road behind the hotel. The square was typical Italian -- the only place in Bellagio that was generically picturesque. We sat down there and ordered pizza before bed (my parents always ate later, after my sister and I were in our room; I think my most recent memory of my yellow nappy footed pajamas was from Bellagio, so I must have been wearing them there when I was eight). The pizza had no tomato sauce! It had no cheese! It had strange grilled vegetables! And fish! Pizza, which was invented in Italy. What a terrible disappointment.

I remember also my parents' friend "the General," who with his wife had a villa up the lake from Bellagio. I went there once, and we had real pizza. Except that the General (I think he was a Second World War general) had a genuine and extreme phobia about cheese. He couldn't come near it. So the pizza we had was crust and wonderful tomato sauce -- no cheese. And I was surprised to find that I didn't miss the cheese a bit. Two different pizza surprises.

posted by william 8:40 PM
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