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, December 16, 2004

I remember (home with a fever today) how my father would shake down the mercury thermometer before taking my temperature (also that they called having a fever "having a temperature"), and how my parents would have trouble reading it when they were done. I didn't see why it was so hard till college, which was the first time I did it myself. I didn't understand, either (and still don't), why you had to shake the thermometer down, since the mercury thermometers that told the outside temperatures rose and fell. Why don't medical thermometers fall?

I remember my parents telling me that mirrors were backed by mercury. I think this is true, though for a while I thought it was false, that this was one of their fallible bits of information, like pi equalling exactly 22/7.

And I remember our English teacher -- Mr. Donahue, I think, though it might have been Mr. Baruch -- telling us how little balls of quicksilver would go squirting around over a surface if you tried to catch them. He said that we might have had this experience if we'd ever broken a thermometer. I seem to recall the experience itself, but I might just be recalling imagining it.

posted by william 4:22 PM
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