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

Sunday, April 03, 2005

I remember learning from a friend's brother that if you filled hot water over cold in a bucket and plunged your hand in, you could feel the layers of different temperatures... intense cold at the fingertips to near-scorching warmth above the elbows. I was skeptical till I tried it myself... but then it made sense... we'd just learnt about land and sea breezes in geography: hot air rises up, cold stays down. But this wasn't about air, it was water... yet, obviously a similar concept. I guess that was when I realized there must be a better explanation than the slogan-like 'hot air rises', and the fact that it was easier to think about mixing and diffusion in liquids than in gases gave me some vague, intuitive idea about thermal energy.

posted by sravana 3:45 PM
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