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, January 13, 2003

I remember learning the word troop from F-Troop, a C-list sit com (for me) which I would watch only if the other possibilities were really bad. So a troop meant some reasonably large group of soldiers. When I started reading about the Viet Nam War and the number of American troops killed each day, I never knew what to multiply that number by to get the number of soldiers. I still don't know how large a number you need to use the word troop. You don't talk about one troop being killed, or two troops. But what about three or more? The word was subtly de-individualizing. "Five soldiers" would mean five separate people, but "five troops" made them faceless, interchangeable, fungible, through that odd plural word applied numerically to a collection of individuals.

posted by william 7:15 AM
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