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

Saturday, April 10, 2004

I remember that my uptown grandmother would assign my grandfather the business of leading the Seder -- the blessing over the Matzoh, the (very minimal) reading from the Haggadah, and I think the carving of some of the meat. This was an event because my grandfather was usually content to follow her lead, and she was unusually intent on leading. She ran everything, and so it was always with some surprise that I saw him running the Seder. The only other time he seemed to have independent initiative at their house was when he was playing bridge, a game my grandmother didn't play. Otherwise he was content to live through her offices. I never knew quite what to think during Seders. Luckily Vlado Hertz usually came too, and he was expert (on Seders and so many other things) so he would pretty much take over. I think the Seder that I'm actually picturing now, with some surprise (although I'm not sure if the surprise is from now or from then) is one that Vlado didn't come to: it was just the family. (My downtown grandfather was much more expert, and insisted much more on his own perogatives.)

posted by william 7:17 AM
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