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, May 06, 2004

I remember the Mary Renault books my parents had, and in particular The Last of the Wine whose title I found very evocative. Somehow that title came up -- I might have made a joke about it at a party where they ran out of wine -- and they asked me what I thought the title meant. I said I thought it was about war about to start (I realize that I still don't know for sure), which I thought because it had that August 1914 sense of the end of things: war starts because plenty fails as well as plenty fails because war starts. After this, the wine is gone. Anyhow they were very impressed with me for seeing this in the title, and I was proud that they were proud of me, especially because I didn't think it was such a big deal that I should be able to interpret it as I did.

posted by william 10:37 PM
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