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, February 02, 2004

I remember that you had to pay more to go to Far Rockaway on the subway. (I think I did once, for some appointment nearby.) I also remember that there a couple of college students, when I was in junior high, spent twenty-five or so hours one very long day and night riding every mile of the subway. They ate only sandwiches. The Times wrote them up. I was somehow confused, and thought they rode one line end to end, and that it was so long it took them 25 hours. (J.G. Ballard has an early story where this sort of subway system exists.) I imagined the engineers of this line changing every eight hours (I didn't consider how they'd get home, though), like the Pony Express. Later, when I rode the West Side IRT number 1 train to the last stop on 242nd St. each day, I was even more puzzled about how large Brooklyn must be for a single ride to take 25 hours.

posted by william 1:45 PM
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