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, September 13, 2003

I remember Eva M, the youngest kid in the family that lived a floor below us at 175 Riverside Drive. (I've since seen a letter or two by her in the New York Times.) She had no legs. She very gallantly walked around on wooden legs. She was always outgoing and cheerful. I think she was two or three years younger than I. She sometimes used crutches -- she had a kind of swinging walk. She'd get into the elevator a floor below me, and then we'd leave together, through the long lobby. I don't remember this being awkward, which means that she must have figured out a routine for stopping to do something so other people could hurry off without having to linger with her. I didn't think much either way about her not having legs: it was a fact about her. It might have been her personality, since I did feel so weird about the guy with missing fingers in school. But Eva was effervescent. My downtown grandmother, with an odd disapproving look -- of Eva? of pharmacology? -- one day, told me that Eva must have been a thalidomide baby. I assumed this was true until very recently, when I found out that thalidomide had never been marketed in the U.S., thanks to the pre-Bush FDA. I miss her smile.

posted by william 7:41 AM
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