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, February 09, 2005

I remember fountain pens, filling them every night. I didn't know of self-filling pens yet, so I'd struggle with the ink dropper and I'd put in too much and there'd be a mess on my fingers and floor. Ball-points were not allowed since they'd make for bad handwriting but this rule was too counterproductive... owing to the fountain pens' tendency to leak and their asymmetric, scratchy nibs. (And my handwriting was inherently, incurably bad by that time anyway.) When I got a little more practiced at filling, I tried to capitalise on the novelty of the ink-bottle-holes (which I called 'inkwells') in my classroom desk by fitting my ink-bottle in there and refilling at lunch. But it got stolen in a few days.

posted by sravana 1:51 PM
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