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

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

I remember Robert Heilbroner, whose obituary I saw in the Times today. He was my friend David's father. I only met him once, maybe in 1973 or early 74. He was completely cool about smoking pot. I remember that the time I met him he was sitting at their piano, and played extremely well. Somehow I didn't put this at all together with David's musicality -- that David was so splendid a classical guitarist. It occurs to me that at the time I didn't think in terms of general musical talent, but thought of the guitar as one thing you could do, and the piano as another. So Robert's piano-playing seemed completely alien, unrelated to anything, since the salient point was that he was an economist, not that they were a musical family. Later that year I read what he had to say about business cycles, and learned a lot about capitalism (and the causes of the 1929 crash) from what I read.

In his obituary I see that he was divorced in 1975, which means that the day I met him was near the end of his marriage. And of course his kids were leaving or had left: I think David graduated high school in 1975 (possibly 1974) so that perhaps David's leaving home was the salient incident after which divorce was possible. But I remember feeling what a well-established home they had: kids, honesty about drug-use, big piano, pianistic skill, all brought safely to the harbor of the kids' beginning to set out on their own, and so this part of the obituary was what most surprised and disturbed me.

posted by william 3:01 PM
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