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 30, 2003

I remember in fifth grade or so we made the transition from Show and Tell to Current Events. We were supposed to bring in newspaper headlines and explain to the class what was going on in the world. I felt very adult about this and interested in the idea of cutting out and pasting those big black headlines. It was then -- maybe the very first day -- of Current Events that I learned about the Viet Nam War. I was shocked (though not shaken). I thought war was a thing of the past, a thing that ended in 1945. How could there be a war on right then? And I continue to wonder.

posted by william 7:16 AM
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