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, April 27, 2005

I remember that one of the things that was so interesting about the time my mother and I chased the gerbil around the house and rescued it when it darted out from under the fridge was that we were both trying to do the same thing without her being any better at it than I was. I liked the fact that we were doing this as equals, that she didn't know any better than I did what would happen or how things would end up. And then when the gerbil appeared and we grabbed it, it was great that we, both of us together, had succeeded! (I think my father was in Chicago at the time.)

posted by william 8:38 PM
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