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, January 27, 2005

I remember what my cousin Cico (Silvio Baruh) told me about his experience at the Bergen-Belsen camp. He generally did not like to talk about that horrible part of his life, but he told me that one of the worst aspects of the camp experience was the roll call. The inmates would be summoned from their miserable barracks to line up outdoors for roll call. They stood shivering in the snow in their rags while the process was completed. Very often someone would not answer when called (probably because he was dead or dying) and the camp authorities would start the roll call all over again. Sometimes the procedure took hours.

posted by alma 8:29 PM
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