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, November 25, 2004

I remember that Thanksgiving used to be at my uptown grandmother's house, but that after the fight between her and my mother and her mother we went downtown instead and didn't tend to see my uptown grandmother, although I have a sense that those unexpected early evening visits my father would pay, usually taking me along, to his parents would tend to happen on Thanksgiving Day. I remember being slightly surprised that my downtown grandmother could doThanksgiving -- I had sort of internalized its heavy food and massive presentations as Ashkenazi, not Sephardic.

posted by william 7:02 AM
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