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

Thursday, September 09, 2004

I remember when our teacher said that she had a friend who was a real Indian, and that her friend would come in. A Cherokee! And she did come in, wearing ordinary clothes. She turned out to be a teacher too. She was interesting, but not of course what anyone expected. This was mildly disappointing, mildly because it turned out that the world (our world) wasn't so various as one thought, and lacking variety all disappointments could be was mild. I found the Cherokee teacher likeable. I wondered a little about how much time it mattered to her that she was Cherokee.

posted by william 9:49 PM
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