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 30, 2003

I remember when our next door neighbors, the Hoges, installed an intercom system in their apartment (2-H). It was the first intercom I ever saw (though I guess I knew the school version from the principal's daily announcements. I was surprised and perturbed to find, when I went to Franklin for Junior High, that the principal and the dean could listen in on class as well as announce things to us). I remember the white boxes in each room, with the white wires stretched against the molding, and the expertise of the whole family in the way they could use this system. Yet it was also a kind of rebuke to the kids, who were supposed to stop screaming from room to room (which they continued doing). Still the way they all knew how to get such a thing installed (like their air-conditioner too! We didn't get one till we moved to 7-F), and then to use it as a family, seemed part of their general, all-American Protestantism.

posted by william 11:51 AM
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