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

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

I remember learning about the Ides of March when my father read me some speeches from Julius Caesar, my first real exposure to Shakespeare (my mother was listening too), and I was very impressed by the way first Brutus was convincing and then Mark Antony was. He read the speeches in the study, and I was interested enough that I listened to their multi-LP of the play; I remember lying on the couch in the living room and listening, where a while earlier -- months? years? -- I had tried to listen to the album of Under Milk Wood that my father brought home one day. (He loves Dylan Thomas and I think went to his last reading.) I remember being puzzled by the title, which seemed glamorous, and by the idea of all the voices. This seemed interesting adult knowledge. And then I was lying on the couch, and I think my mother had explained the Ides of March to me. This must have been a few weeks before it actually was the Ides of March, because I remember being puzzled to learn that there were Ides in other months also. I'd thought Ides of March was somehow a compound term for a single day in the year. I was surprised that other kids -- I think this was fifth grade, Mrs. Brenner's class -- knew about the Ides of March, and then that the textbook or maybe the teacher told us about other months with Ides in them. I remember there was some rule about Ides and their relation to the fifteenth of the month, but I can't remember what it was. And I remember "Et tu, Brute."

posted by william 8:50 PM
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