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, July 13, 2003

I remember that the New York Times never had a front page article which broke at the end of a sentence. If you read to the end of the column, you always were left hanging with a fragment, continued on the inside. At first I thought this was accidental, but then realized that with at least ten or twelve jumps every day, day in and day out, the odds against this were astronomical. Once or twice in my life I found a column that ended with a full-stop -- it was like finding a four-leaf clover. I was very impressed with the Times for doing this (I think I realized that it had to be intentional in tenth grade or so): they were serenly inscrutable, but they knew me, knew their audience and that the dangling, unfinished sentence would be a powerful incentive to make the jump. It made me feel good, the way my reaction turned out to be somehow the right reaction, the reaction of the reader they were contemplating. I felt that I had some connection to what was in print before me (like the narrator in Proust being thrilled when he saw his name and article in Le Figaro), not that I was named but that my way of reading was anticipated in the editorial architectonic of the paper. It was constructed for and around just what I was. (My name was actually in the Times for the first time in twelfth grade, for winning a scholarship, but in a fine print list, so to me it didn't count. MY actual name seemed to refer to me less than did that deviously constant broken sentence at the bottom of every column. Those columns knew and accepted me as I truly was.)

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