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, April 15, 2005

I remember hating hard candy, but often forcing myself to have it. The candy rage in kindergarten was this orange and white disk with a string through the center that you held and spun, and licked the disk as it rotated. They were ridiculously cheap – a bag of five or so for less than a rupee. Five-a-bag was economical, but it meant, unfortunately, that having at last yielded and bought them, I had to finish all five though they were making me quite sick. Then there was my fifth birthday cake – a train engine and driver, and someone suggested generously that I eat the sugar driver. A privilege – since all the kids seemed to want it. But it was a struggle to finish it... I’d look around enviously at people eating cake, but it seemed like I was expected to love what I was given, and I couldn’t very well give up and declare that I didn’t. (I did, eventually, after an eternity of nibbling through the head. But by then, there was no more cake.) Then there were candy cigarettes, but I had realized that you didn’t have to actually consume them – just carry them around and suck on one occasionally, so people knew you were up on the current candy trends. But even sucking was near-unendurable. I remember the cigarettes got banned in school after a while, which was a relief from my point of view...

posted by sravana 7:40 PM
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