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, February 17, 2003

I remember a blizzard when I was about eight years old. My father and I walked I think to his office, through the powdery snow; I seem to recall walking on Broadway in the seventies. It was close to a total white-out, and hard to walk on the very granular powder. I thought it was wonderful. At that age, you didn't feel that warmth and interiors were any big deal or any great relief: that must have come at about twelve or thirteen. Yes, you could be cold, and then, yes, it was nice not to be cold any more. But there was no premium in the sense of warmth itself -- no grateful, luxurious relief from the cold. I think that was why I didn't like baths either. I had no sense yet of snuggling. So that the blizzard was something that I felt with a kind of purity: not a prelude to the wonderful return to some warm well-lit interior, but a surprisingly difficult, cold, new, and interesting experience. It was most surprising, I think, that powder should be so tiring to walk on, and that the sky-scrapers I would occasionally look up at should be so shrouded in white.

posted by william 6:42 PM
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