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, June 23, 2003

I remember Jackie and Ari kissing. I think the Daily News had it -- some tabloid did. A classmate brought it to school. Their romance was known at the time -- or rather, her interest in his money, as we thought it -- but this was the first photo. It was really shocking: beautiful young Jackie Kennedy smooching this old, old man. We'd only seen her kissing JFK before that. Later their relationship became a familiar part of the landscape. But that first published kiss floored us. I remember how we all clustered around the kid who had the newspaper, shocked by what could only be the mystery of genuine passion: how else could anyone bear to kiss Aristotle Onasis? His wealth alone couldn't do it: the surrender to the rush of absurdity was too great. It had to be love, but then how absurd love was.

posted by william 5:33 AM
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