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

Friday, February 11, 2005

I remember reading The Crucible in high school. I knew about Death of a Salesman, but we ended up reading the newer and more newly assigned Crucible instead. (I felt a little gypped, since the cooler older kids had read the classic play.) We had no idea it was about McCarthyism. But we did know that it was opposed to the Salem Witch trials. I remember seeing it on stage, maybe at the Vivian Beaumont, maybe at Circle in the Square, in a class trip after we'd read it. I think this might have been ninth grade. What I remember in particular was a lovely moment in the play, and in class when we were studying it, where (as our teacher pointed out) the husband tastes the soup his wife (Goody ???) has made while she's out of the room for a minute, and then surreptitiously adds salt to it. She returns and serves him the soup, asking anxiously what he thinks, how's it seasoned, and he praises her, says it's perfect. And our teacher pointed out what a lovely moment of self-effacing generosity that is. For me it had the desired effect of making the horrors to come that much more outrageous. Arthur Miller, thou shouldst be living at this hour. RIP.

posted by william 1:04 PM
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