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

Tuesday, June 03, 2003

I remember our homeroom teacher Mr. Donahue (unless, again, it was Mr. Baruch) telling us that adolescence was a very hard time. I was puzzled by this, because to me it didn't seem that hard: you had friends, fun, and a pretty decent sense of where you stood in the eyes of adults. (Where you stood in the eyes of your peers was a different question, but didn't seem like a new one.) I remember thinking that if this was a hard time, then maybe hard times weren't that hard (although I worrled, sometimes a lot, about how I would respond to my grandparents' deaths -- whether my grief would be appropriate, or too little, or too much). Even now I don't recall adolescence as a very hard time, certainly not like what came later; but I doubt that I'd still have the strength to be an adolescent.

posted by william 6:03 AM
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