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

Saturday, January 31, 2004

I remember my parents rebuking me for various things that I had done that I thought really were victimless crimes (like wearing torn jeans, going around in the cold in shirtsleeves, not brushing my hair, being generally slovenly, etc.) They would explain their anger by saying that my behavior was "a reflection on them." Somehow they thought this was a powerful argument, and that it would encourage me to alter my behavior. Whereas I thought that anyone stupid enough to connect what I was doing to their conventions and codes of behavior was too stupid to take seriously, and that they were being sort of stupid themselves to think that this was a good argument.

posted by william 12:13 AM
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