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, February 05, 2004

I remember how surprised I was whenever my father took me to a James Bond movie (after the first one I saw, From Russia with Love) by Sean Connery's voice. I always forgot that low, gravelly, Scottish bass that he has, and always expected, I think, something closer to Robert Vaughan's Napoleon Solo, the closest thing on TV to the divine Bond movies. It always took me three or four minutes to get used to Sean Connery's voice: and then it seemed transparent again.

posted by william 11:58 AM
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