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, March 04, 2004

I remember various (or was it only one?) International Geophysical Years. (Were they consecutive? Weren't there three in a row?) I remember, at any rate, that one was coming up, and my geography textbook was pleased. I seem to remember as well an international Antarctic year, although maybe the International Geophysical Year that was coming up was devoted to Antarctica. At the time the idea of a year that was International and also Geophysical didn't make sense, but in a way that a lot of interesting things didn't make sense: that is it seemed a very neat, rarefied, institutional entity that I wasn't old enough to understand the workings of. Now I think I don't know what it was at all, except in the crudest sense: a kind of World's Fair of Geophysical science. But what does that mean?

posted by william 10:13 PM
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