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, October 02, 2003

I remember that once when I failed to return three books to the New York Public Library in eleventh grade (one of them was Beckett's Three Novels) a library investigator came to our building looking for me! I wasn't there, but my mother was. How could something so trivial lead to this Kafkaesque persecution? The Public Library had investigators? They pursued people through the city? The investigator left word that he'd be back if I didn't return the books. I didn't know who I was in more trouble with, the Library or my mother. It was interesting, and alas this was not the last time that this was so, the possibility of being in trouble deeper than the trouble you could be in with your parents. Up until then my parents were as much the origin and final arbiters of trouble as they were of love. But this was my discovery of real trouble -- the trouble that life brings with her in her equipage -- and how much farther than the parental realm it can extend, how powerless parental love finally is to neutralize it.

posted by william 7:49 AM
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