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

Thursday, August 14, 2003

I remember my mother lighting Sabbath candles at sundown Friday evenings. This was my father's idea, I'm pretty sure, since my mother is a determined atheist, and sympathetic only to the druids. But she was game, and we would say a prayer, and then sit down and eat, on a somewhat nicer table-cloth than usual. It's hard to say how often we did this, but I suspect it wasn't more than a dozen times. I can only remember one specific occasion, but the atmosphere of familiarity that goes with that memory means that it wasn't the only time. It was surprisingly nice -- given the ritual of prayers, which on holidays with company bored me to tears. I think what I liked about it was my mother doing well something that wasn't the kind of thing she did (although I didn't know then that she had no attraction to this at all). I liked her calm knowledge of how everything was done, and so her serene competence at lighting the candles had a calming, Sabbath-like effect. Anyone might have done so as well and as calmly as she did, but this didn't matter: she was the one who was doing it.

posted by william 6:54 AM
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