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, June 01, 2004

I remember my surprise that four had a u in it, that vacuum had two u's (I got this wrong on a spelling test), and also that you wrote "4" without the triangular shape, but with the top open. I remember also that I wrote "5" wrong, since the top horizontal was supposed to be done last, as a kind of flag to the body of the numeral. But I always wrote it as a single arabesque. I think that of these things, the thing that surprised me most was that you didn't write a 4 the way it looked in type. This made much more sense for the letter g the way it used to appear on typewriters, as a kind of hanging pair of spectacles or pince-nez. (I remember I used to think they were prince-nez.) It was much harder to write that g. But why the 4?

posted by william 11:38 PM
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