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

Wednesday, August 18, 2004

I remember that one of the differences between my status as a child and my mother's as a knowing adult was the she used an oral thermometer whereas they took my temperature with a rectal one. Knowing how to use an oral thermometer belonged to the set of beautiful talents that she had -- like knowing how to wear contact lenses and when to give aspirin and how to sing and how to draw and in general how to be beautiful. And also, interestingly, it never seemed to me that my father had any relation to having his temperature taken: he was as unlikely to have a fever as to ride in the passenger seat of a car. So I guess I thought of my mother as a person whose life I might one day have, or at least live within: what it would be like to be the adult version of my child-self. But my father was pure adult.

posted by william 3:44 PM
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