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

Sunday, July 25, 2004

I remember being surprised that park and playground were not synonymous. I think my uptown grandparents took me to what they called a park, and I was looking forward to it -- and then there was no playground there! I confused the two because whenever the adults took me "to the park" we went to the playground (in Riverside Park at 90th street). A little later I think I thought that what defined a park was a place with a playground in it, so that playgrounds and parks formed coextensional sets. (A playground by itself was enough to constitute a park.) I still have something of this archaic view of parks, since I still can't quite get either a National Park or an industrial park to seem legitimately so-called.

posted by william 11:35 AM
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