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

Saturday, August 30, 2003

I remember that my parents were completely indifferent to the presence of the driver when they had intense conversations in cabs -- either to berate each other, or to berate my sister and me, or to discuss some pressing issue (really pressing, or just pressing as to logistics). I was always surprised by this indifference, not quite embarrassed by it as I usually was when I saw them acting according to a prerogative that I thought neither graceful nor something they were quite entitled to, but surprised, because it seemed to indicate more that they had a better sense of the dynamics of taxi-cab conversation than I did, and seemed somehow to know that the driver couldn't hear what they were saying. I knew this wasn't true, but I was more than usually willing to hope that my knowledge was wrong.

posted by william 3:49 PM
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