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, May 26, 2003

I remember my surprise and disappointment that words that rhymed in English didn't rhyme in other languages. (I was realizing, I think, that mother and brother didn't rhyme in Yugoslav: at any rate I'm pretty sure "mother" was one of the words.) This felt like a dereliction on the part of the authorities, an inexcusable laxness in the way they structured language. It might have been my first inkling of the fact that languages were unsponsered.

posted by william 1:05 AM
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