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

Tuesday, April 20, 2004

I remember Mrs. Russler, one of the Hebrew School teachers (and who reminded me a lot of my uptown grandmother, although I hadn't been in her class yet) giving a stern talk at some event, some extraordinary symposium, one afternoon, taking Lord Snowden to task for his claim that Jews were probably genetically endowed to be intellectually superior. I was surprised that she was against this idea -- who wouldn't want to be genetically superior? But she was fierce, and it was neat to have this experience of intellectual surprise. She was obviously right, and I believed her, and yet I'd assumed completely that she would take the opposite tack -- partly because the opposite tack would provide a reason to believe her: she was Jewish, she was smarter. This is the earliest experience I can remember of a kind of intellectual thrill in being convinced of the superiority of a new idea.

posted by william 11:49 PM
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