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, October 31, 2002

I remember my father's partner Gus Casado. He was congenitally late, traveling in from New Jersey, so I had to call him every morning to be sure he was awake and getting ready to go. This was when I learned the 201 area code. I sort of thought this was a joke, but my father was dead serious, and unhappy if I forgot to make the call, which I often did between walking Powell and getting ready for school. I was supposed to call at ten to eight. Later Gus and his family were in a plane crash on their way to Florida. My father heard about a crash on the radio, and called just to be sure they were not on that plane. But they were. Gus and his wife and daughter survived. (The plane went down in the Everglades.) The people in the rows ahead of them and behind them died. I think half the passengers survived. There was a full page photo of Mrs. Casado with their infant daughter, both crying, on the front page of the next day's Daily News.

posted by william 11:49 PM
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