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, August 14, 2004

I remember blind beggars selling pencils for a nickel. The pencils were unsharpened, which I thought was a mistake. My mother and I passed a pencil-seller once, and I gave him a nickel, at her urging, I believe, and was about to take a pencil. She told me not to, and said that the pencils were really there just to preserve their dignity. But then why did they need so many? It seemed to me that if they weren't really selling them, one would have been enough. I thought it would be ok to take the pencil I purchased. But I didn't. It would have been hard to get it out of the rubber-banded bunch it was in anyhow.

posted by william 8:09 PM
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