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

Friday, February 13, 2004

I remember my uptown grandmother telling me that I-80 (though she just pointed to it; I didn't know the "name" of the road) went all the way from the George Washington Bridge to San Francisco. I was as amazed as she wanted me to be. It did seem amazing that one road could go all that way. I somehow imagined it -- I have no idea why -- passing through an avenue of arched beech or elm trees, all the way from New York to California, straight as an arrow or a Roman road. Later I drove to California and back, on scenic routes, but I think I've been on most of I-80; and it's not at all what I pictured, but crooked a lot and sometimes distorted, much like my grandmother's fairy-tale witch's fingers.

posted by william 10:13 PM
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