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, November 02, 2003

I remember doing a report on fruits and vegetables in third grade, or maybe second. It was a collage report on colored construction paper. My parents helped me, a lot. They had all sorts of neat binding gadgets, and they used a three-hole punch and some manilla envelope ribbon to bind the report together. But what I particularly remember was the austere page, all in black, near the end with a picture of a tomato glued right in the middle, and the caption "A tomato is a fruit." My mother put this page together. I was very surprised that a tomato was a fruit, and impressed that the page knew that it was surprising. But I was also surprised by my parents' knowledge. This was one of those times, like the time when they told me that the first straight-edges were traced against taut string, that I was impressed with the sheer extent of their knowledge. Not impressed that they knew more than me, which was obvious, but that they had a kind of command of a vast space of knowledge that I didn't know existed. Generally they seemed to me the adult presiders over a world whose measure I knew even if I didn't know its contents or its controls. I thought I saw what I would grow into knowing. But in moments like this, I became aware that their knowledge exceeded mine in kind as well as in degree. They grew somehow distanced from me, they expanded like a benign version of the father figure in Kafka's "Judgment." They were no longer captured by the term "my parents," whereby I was the center that defined the circumference of the world they knew and acted in. They were something else besides, strange to me, remote, distant as their own friends. "A tomato is a fruit:" in a way this was my first inkling of adult life.

posted by william 12:48 PM
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