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

Thursday, January 15, 2004

I remember that in my seventh grade Latin textbook I found this note one day: "I like you very much and I think that you are a very cute ~~buoy~~ boy. Love, ? ? ?" Who was she? And why that misspelling of an obvious word? I considered everyone in the class, and no one seemed right. Which was ok, because I didn't particularly want it to be any individual in that class. Except maybe Wendy Wachtel, but I had enough knowledge of the world to know it wasn't her. The anonymity was somehow better. Of course, it could have been a prank, written by a male classmate, but I don't think it was, because the moment that I would be fooled, my experience of being fooled, would never be public. So someone did think I was a cute boy. Mostly, those weren't the days, but in this one instance: those were the days.

posted by william 4:12 PM
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