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, January 23, 2004

I remember getting a small pox vaccination, before my parents took me to Europe for the first time. (Useful to know!) I was surprised that it didn't hurt -- it was a scratch and not a shot. I hated shots, but this was nothing. But even though I hated shots, I knew that they were no big deal, and I was surprised when I heard that the series of fourteen rabies shots were supposed to be so terrible. Why? I knew they were into your stomach, but still. Just fourteen, over the course of a month. I imagined the needles must have been gigantic -- otherwise adults wouldn't dwell on how awful they were. But I couldn't understand why you'd need gigantic needles, since it was just a question of getting attenuated virus into the bloodstream. That was a time of my life when being sick rarely felt any different from being healthy. I almost never felt bad when I was sick (oh, I did from stomach aches -- but not from fevers), and tended to take the word of adults, especially Dr. Steffy, as to when I was sick and when not.

posted by william 7:27 AM
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