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

Sunday, January 16, 2005

I remember reading To Kill a Mockingbird because we had just learnt the song Listen to the Mockingbird in singing class. It was the first I'd heard of the bird, and I liked the weird evocativeness of the name. (Also, I think I was just beginning my ornithology-craze.) I was fascinated that the book and the song were connected, and that the connection had seemingly little to do with mockingbirds.

I remember that it was the first book I’d read that openly dealt with rape, so I was wary about my parents’ reaction when they saw me reading it, and was surprised that they didn’t seem to mind.

I remember that the copy I read was a Penguin edition from the bookshelf upstairs, and that it was labelled with my father’s name. Not long after, I found a hardback downstairs in the drawing room that turned out to be my mother’s: I thought there was a cool symmetry about that. Then I started noticing some other symmetries in my parents’ respective collections: The Ramayana and The Mahabharata, The Prophet and The Broken Wings, The Bhagavad Gita and Gitanjali, War and Peace and Crime and Punishment, Peter Camenzind and Gertrude. But not many doubles: The Return of the Native, The Odyssey (I hunted a lot for The Iliad), and a Somerset Maugham collected stories.

posted by sravana 10:53 AM
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