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

Monday, January 03, 2005

I remember when it cost more to send a domestic letter airmail than surface mail. And then it turned out that it all went airmail anyhow if it was long distance, and once this got public the post office stopped charging differential rates.

I remember my father explaining to me that mail from abroad was carried for free by the country it went to. I remember wondering why it cost twice as much, and assumed that this was for the trip over the ocean, to the borders of Europe. Later, when they instituted double-cost one-way toll crossings over the Hudson, and explained that almost everyone who went one way returned the other, I realized that the same strangely and somehow grimly inexorable logic -- as though there were no freedom, but only repetition -- applied to the mail too.

But it didn't seem so grim when it came to the mail, since the bi-directionality of mail meant that there was communication between two parties, not the endless dull back and forth of one. That communication would be reciprocated was somehow normal and obvious to the postal authorities, and that seemed wonderful and hopeful to me.

posted by william 10:35 PM
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