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

Monday, January 19, 2004

I remember that my father's friend Mr. Glocer, serenely old, gentle and grandfatherly, purveyor of chocolates, with a lovely house (or maybe I remember him sitting on the porch in Stormville), had a son my age -- eleven! -- who was an uncle! (My uncle, my father's elder brother, had been killed in the Second World War and I always had a wistful relation to the idea of an uncle.) And not only that -- his nephew was an adult! I remember that I was puzzled by the implications for lines of familial authority. My father told me about Mr. Glocer's son's adult nephew in his office one Saturday, during tax season when I came in with him -- that's when I was eleven. Now the child-uncle, my father recently told me, is head of Reuters, which means that there are still living survivors of the gentle embodiments of old age from one's early youth.

posted by william 3:43 PM
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