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

Friday, January 17, 2003

I remember the Neptune health club, on the roof of a building on 97th Street and West End. There was a pool there, which was really neat. Bill Dave After School would take us there when the weather was bad. (We might have gone only once.) It was I think in the same building that my Great Aunt Anna (Teta Anna) lived. We never really saw her except with her younger brother, my downtown Grandfather. I think she wasn't at all close to my mother. I liked her, but no more than that -- she was like the other old ladies associated with my grandparents, in particular the two (unrelated) Mrs. Rotkopfs. (Then there was only one.) I remember finding it slightly odd that here was this relative, who even gave me candy, who didn't seem any closer to me and whom I didn't love any more, than any other old lady. She represented the place where the nuclear family dropped off sharply and merged with the general population. It made a certain amount of sense that she would live in a building with a health club in it -- one of those other New York buildings, with their minor features and surprises, and not one of the buildings I knew.

posted by william 7:16 AM
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