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, February 03, 2005

I remember always being slightly puzzled that you would sometimes go through New Jersey to go up state or North. It was very hard for me, once I found out (to my shock!) that Manhattan was an island -- that of the five boroughs only the Bronx was part of the great comforting maternal mass of the continent -- to think of it as vertical. The East side and the West side were names for what felt to me like the North and South -- out of our window you would (I thought) look South towards New Jersey, and on the East Side North towards -- well kind of towards Connecticut. So why go South towards Jersey to go upstate?

At any rate, I remember once doing just that, riding with Ronnie Stern, Geoffrey's brother who'd just gotten into Lehigh, in one of two or three cars we were taking, maybe to their house in Vermont -- the Shangri-La of Windham where they skiied and where I always wanted to go because it seemed like heaven.

I remember that we took the Garden State Parkway, and that Jerry, their father, told Ronnie what exit to get off at. And I remember that while we were driving, Ronnie at one point had to do something -- but what? Get change for a toll? Put it away? -- and asked me to hold the wheel from the passenger seat. This was scary, unexpected -- did people do such things? -- and a little bit of an honor. Ronnie was adult enough to know that you could do this, but I was so innocent of driving that I didn't know it had ever been done (my parents never did such a thing). I did hold the wheel, nervously and without even faking aplomb, to Ronnie's mild amusement or disdain, and it was also interesting to be trusted to handle a car going 60 miles per hour by someone who was disdaining you for your cluelessness at the same time.

I remember, relevantly, a TV show where the bad guy pulls a gun on the hero and tells him where to drive. The hero floors the car and the bad guy starts panicking as they hit high speeds. He tells him to slow down, but the hero says, "Drop the gun! You can't shoot me or you'll die too." I liked this quick thinking. It seemed so unexpected and watertight.

posted by william 2:19 PM
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