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

Sunday, March 09, 2003

I remember how much idle time I spent conceiving perpetual motion machines. Then I think Mr. Reeves in chemistry (also our soccer coach) showed that you could get free work out of them and that they were therefore impossible. This was a very neat connection. I knew that Leonardo had tried to invent one, but he didn't have a Heath-Kit Jr. and so didn't know about photoelectric cells. My idea was that a light bulb surrounded by a parabolic mirror would get electricity going in a photovoltaic cell, while a pan of water placed above it would capture its heat, turning the water into steam to drive a turbine (as it did in my steam engine) that would also produce electricity, the two currents then joining to light the bulb. Alas, it was not to be.

posted by william 7:33 AM
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