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 26, 2005

I remember that if you left the phone off the hook, or just held it, eventually an operator would come on to see what was happening. This was a way children could get emergency help. I suppose the operators could also hear if violence or disaster had knocked the phone off the hook. For me, the main consequence of connecting to the operator was that you couldn't play phone-off-the-hook games for very long -- listening to the dial-tone, making imaginary calls, pulling the wonderful coiled cord straight -- without an adult asking what you were doing. But it was comforting to know that an adult was always handy.

posted by william 7:42 AM
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