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, September 25, 2004

I remember being impressed and surprised by my downtown grandfather's spending the whole of Yom Kippur day (and the evening before) in the synagogue (not "Shul" because he was Sephardic), praying and understanding the adult version of the ceremonies apparently as well as the other people of his generation. (I remember there was some issue about Tallises too, wherein the Sephardic and Ashkenazi rituals differed. I think maybe the Sephardim didn't all put them on on Yom Kippur; maybe just the cantor. I also remember the cantor at B'nai Jeshrun, who knew a lot but was sort of powerless to perform real ritual, so I thought, like a vice-president.) I remember that my downtown grandfather wouldn't break fast till very late. I remember once being struck by a wave of weakness while waiting for the elevator near the end of the fast, and my father telling me to eat -- but I took it a lot less seriously than he did. I remember that I weighed about 105 pounds at the time, because I weighed myself near the end of the fast, and I was surprised at the two or three pound difference the fast made. I remember that the delicious yeasty chocolate coffee-cake babka my grandmother made was often marred by being burnt at the bottom, so you couldn't eat one of the delicious buttery layers of pastry. I remember trying to think of all the wrongs done to me so I could forgive them, and also the wrongs I had done, and not doing well remembering a lot of either. Things have changed since.

posted by william 7:50 AM
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