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, October 05, 2003

I remember that I learned the word especially from my mother. I thought I was mishearing "special," but I wasn't. I remember that she used this word a lot (and may still do so; but I noticed it then). It was a word I associated with her -- an intensifier of some sort. There was an odd expertise that it signalled: she knew things, and she knew their subtleties and varieties and could focus in on those parts of them about which something was especially true; or on those things in the world about which something was especially the case. I remember that it was interesting that especially didn't mean special in the high-praise mode of special (as in "a special occasion," which I guess is where I most heard and used the word). This may have been my first intuition about how adverbs worked: they could add texture and nuance to a judgment or the the object of a judgment. And that texture and nuance was that of my mother, of her voice, of her saying those four syllables.

posted by william 11:12 PM
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