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, December 14, 2003

I remember that everyone would applaud when we landed safely on our trips to and from Europe in the summer when I was a kid. These were Swiss-Air charter flights (always hours late), when charters were the only way to get discounts. I don't know whether applauding was a standard convention at the time (as I didn't know that it was when everyone applauds at the end of Kingsfield's last class in The Paperchase, till my mother told me that this was standard -- indeed standard at the end of every lecture); whether it was or not, it must have been the case that people applauded because for them air travel was not as routine as it later became. And yet the passengers also seemed like connoisseurs, and I felt proud to be among them and their expertise. It seemed a fine and European thing to do.

posted by william 11:38 PM
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