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 31, 2003

I remember, this cold winter, the winter that we rented a house in Westhampton Beach. It was incredibly cold and the bay froze solid. We went out on ice-skates, as in a 17th century Dutch painting, and skated for miles in one direction in the middle of the bay. I remember some people out in an ice-boat! Where did they get it from? It had a sail and runners and went scudding over the ice at an amazing rate. The bay was covered with people on skates. The idea of being able to go maybe 7 miles in one direction was fantastic. I promised myself I would do this when I got a little older. I had a naive idea of regularity, and thought that this winter was typical. The next winter was also very cold, cold enough to pretty much freeze the local pond, on which we played hockey, with goals and sticks -- though I fell through the rotten ice where, I now guess, decaying leaves must have been heating things up a bit, by the shore at the woodsy end of the pond. Not too scary in practice, even though very scary in theory. But the winter never got cold enough again to freeze the salt-water bay. It felt like an image of freedom whose return I've fruitlessly been awaiting. All those miles into the unknown.

posted by william 1:05 AM
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