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, August 31, 2003

I remember the sense of impersonal existence that I accorded to the city (and still do, even to other cities). It's not that institutions seemed to me to exist impersonally -- what was (and remains) odd is that it was the city itself, its police, garbage, fire, school, and transportation services -- that seemed to exist as an entity in which people filled the roles assigned to them or made available to them. The city had for me the status of a purely natural entity, of nature itself. It was the ground or base or context of existence. It was the environment. Hence some of my surprise, now, to see things change (not that things weren't always changing; but that change, in those days, was the constant, defining change of the flow of the river, not the course of the riverbed). How could that environment itself have changed so much? And yet New York is still fundamentally the same: the friendliness of its sidewalks and asphalt streets and manholes and building corners. Who wouldn't respond to that friendliness? I think one of the reasons the September 11 attacks were so shocking to me was that it seemed so wrong to think of New York, the physical place, the way the terrorists did, as anything other than friendly and patient and intelligently genial. I think that this has something to do with the odd sense that I have that part of my horror about the attacks had to do with the way they inconvenienced everyone -- inconvenienced those who died and inconvenienced their survivors (one of my students, Bob M., died). What happened then was the totality of inconvenience: it would no longer be possible to fulfill the plans one had made: plans to eat out that night, or get the kids at school, or have a drink with an old friend, or see someone you had a crush on, or see the kids grow up, or care for one's aging parents, or pursue love, or see Matrix Reloaded, or finish Mason & Dixon or pursue the thoughts you were going to pursue, or think about, or think about time or space or death or hope or despair or cigarettes or a haircut or rock music or going to the beach or sunsets or puns and jokes or clean sheets or going to get pizza with your mother as she promised before rushing off for work that morning, ever again. All these conveniences, the things that come with life (convenire), and are life itself, taken away, even that most pleasant convenience of having a familiar language to understand in. The inconvenience of the attacks is unfathomable, as my friend Jeff says. It was puzzling to see the shots of bin Laden drinking tea -- such a lovely little pleasure -- and showing with his fingers how the planes hit the towers, and to think that he didn't think about the lovely little pleasures of others, or thought about them simply and only as what could be taken away, since in this life there is nothing else that we have and therefore nothing else to be taken away. The point is that the city is a place for human convenience, and that human hospitality and sociability is about making life bearable for others. And the city provides those conveniences, most of them, so naturally, though the natural world itself, the Hobbesian world of the terrorists, doesn't provide them naturally at all. How can one fail to love the city? "Here are my books and my papers," as Doctor Johnson said, he who said also, "He who is tired of London is tired of life." But none of those people who died were tired of the city.

posted by william 5:54 PM
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