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

Monday, December 02, 2002

I remember that when my reading was obsessive, non-stop, utter absorbed, as an early teenager, my downtown grandfather told me he had been the same way as a youth. My grandparents' house had very few books, mostly Readers Digest condensed books, and a few books on bridge, and some Leon Uris. I think they had The Good Earth, the first book I read consciously because it had been written by a Nobel Prize winner. (I didn't finish it.) My grandmother read a lot -- I seem to remember that she read Judith Rossner's August -- but she picked up her books elsewhere, perhaps at her bridge club, perhaps at my parents' house, and had almost none at her house. So I was surprised to hear that my grandfather was such a passionate reader. He said that he remembered standing underneath the street lamps, in Sofia I think, when he was seventeen, late at night, because he couldn't stop reading. And he said that he had a "nervous breakdown," and from one day to the next found himself unable to read a single page. He said that he then went without reading for what? -- maybe fifty years -- until fairly recently when he'd begun to read again, but very little at a time. I worried that such a fate was in store for me too, but so far I am still able to read, though not as then. I seem to recall that someone fairly obvious, whom either I had read or hadn't, was his favorite author in his youth. Dumas? Balzac? I wish I could remember who it was, since I took his tastes very seriously. The picture of him reading so passionately all those years ago, and that time of life having been obliterated, had something of the same effect on me as (later) Andre Kertesz's great photography book On Reading which just shows people lost in their books and newspapers. We see them reading, but we don't see what they are reading, and all these figures absorbed in their own worlds seem oddly and completely inaccessible to me. They are in another world, but the photo can't show what the world is, since we can't read what they're reading, not even the titles, and so we see them but we can't reach them. They are far more distant than most people in photographs -- even dead people -- usually are. And my grandfather seemed distanced in the same way. I do wish I could remember whom they (my mother and grandmother) said was his favorite author. That would give me some access, perhaps.

posted by william 12:39 AM
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