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

Sunday, December 01, 2002

I remember my parents and some friends (the Herings?) taking us to look at the Christmas windows downtown. I didn't know about them at all. We went at night, with lots of other people. It was dark and snowy. I was surprised and delighted by how elaborate the windows were. The lines were worth it. It seemed festive and strange. The festivity seemed distant from me, just as Christmas itself was -- a Christian holiday that we didn't celebrate (though the Herings did). So it seemed somehow exactly right that we were out in the cold looking through glass at scenes in stores that were themselves closed. The scenes in the window were inaccessible. They belonged to a space that we couldn't get too: the space of Christmas itself. I remember always being disconcerted by seeing window dressers in windows. The windows were somehow supposed to be free of human presence. At night during the holiday season they always were.

posted by william 12:54 AM
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