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, December 25, 2004

I remember that my father was strongly opposed to the plastic Christmas tree the Hoges got one year. (The Cramers also had a tree, and so did some Jewish and half-Jewish friends.) It seemed interesting that my father was so against it, so that I took it that somehow plastic Christmas trees were Christian -- normal American, like baloney or peanut butter and jelly which we never ate -- whereas Jews, or at least Ashkenazi Jews, supported real evergreens.

posted by william 9:04 PM
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