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, March 11, 2005

I remember learning the word "loot" from the Hardy Boys (where I also learned the word "chums"), and I remember learning the word "evaporate" in third grade, long before I knew the word "vapor." I knew that clouds were formed by evaporation, which is also why things dried up. I remember from seventh grade that what you see coming out of a kettle isn't steam but condensed water-vapor, and that steam is invisible. And I remember my surprise when I learned, maybe during some fire hazards lesson, that steam (the ordinary kind, the kind you can see), isn't smoke. This had something to do with what smoke from a candle was made of: burnt particles of wick and wax.

posted by william 6:25 PM
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