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

Friday, December 05, 2003

I remember that I assumed that my parents knew that I was smoking, and that they were wisely not challenging me. I smoked so much: how could they not know? I was impressed by their wisdom (though I don't know if this wise silence would really have been effective; but it still seemed like the right Ward Cleaver response). But then they found some cigarettes in my pocket -- English Ovals! what a fool I was -- and they hit the roof. I'm not sure that was a wise response either, especially since it meant that they were so much less insightfully aware of what I was doing than I'd thought.

posted by william 7:22 PM
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