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, January 11, 2004

I remember that Jerry Stern, Geoffrey's father, would eat everything the apple, core, pits and all -- everything but the stem. I never saw him do this, but my sister (whose best friend was Geoff's sister), who would have no reason to make this up, told me that he did; and said he'd demonstrated it to her. I tried it myself (I thought of him as a person who knew how to do things right: after all he was Geoff's father! And not snooty, like his mother; so he was doubly wonderful) and found that you could do it, but that it wasn't particularly pleasant. Still it was neat to have the cyanide bitterness of the apple pits be a goal and not a mistake.

posted by william 11:34 PM
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