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, March 16, 2005

I remember my father telling me, the night before we took the train below the St. Gothard pass from Switzerland to Italy, that the tunnel was a triumph of engineering. (I was eight.) He said that they had tunneled from both sides and met in the middle, and that when they met they were only off by an inch, which really impressed me.

I think being off by an inch always impressed me. An inch meant that perfect accuracy was hard; an inch meant that near perfect accuracy had been achieved. I remember that after the Apollo astronauts left mirrors on the moon, NASA could determine the moon's distance from the earth to within an inch.

I remember the day we got to Zurich we all tumbled into featherbeds and slept the afternoon away, and then that night my sister and I couldn't sleep and played cards till 3 in the morning. (She was three? Could we really have been playing cards together? Or what were we doing?) I remember that the third year we went, I insisted on staying up till bedtime, and this worked much better.

I remember I would get sick from Milanese water every time we got to Milan; and then better in a day or two.

posted by william 9:37 PM
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