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, September 04, 2003

I remember Mikhail Tal (whose name I loved) the chess world champion would read beginners' chess books every year, so as to always be fresh. I liked it that he was reading just what I was reading, and was somehow getting both more and less out of it than I was: less because he knew all this stuff; more because he was getting out of it what the champion of the world would get out of it.

posted by william 11:55 PM
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