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, May 03, 2004

I remember a couple of things that I thought about passing City College on 135th street in my grandparents' car, going to or from their house. I remember going uptown and being threatened with being returned to the store. (This wasn't during a particular episode of discipline; it was really more-or-less idle talk about discipline.) I had an image of rack on rack of kids lying there waiting to be picked up, all of them like me: my age and height (and sex). And going downtown once I remember wondering how you could be sure you understood a language, that you could learn one accurately, since maybe you were understanding different things from what was being said, and being understood as saying different things from what you meant, with pure good luck leading to apparent agreement. Truth: I thought this myself! But didn't follow up on what I was thinking at 8 or so, till I read Quine years later.

posted by william 11:23 PM
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