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

Monday, May 09, 2005

I remember two interesting news items from when I first started reading the newspaper. One was that a Japanese soldier had just surrendered, decades after the end of the war. He'd been left on some remote (though not uninhabited) island with orders to stay there, and stay he did. He lived in caves and ate bugs, roots, and rats, I believe. He was finally found, a very old man (how old? maybe not as old as I thought of him as being then), and informed that the war was long over, although Hirohito was still Emperor. I couldn't imagine this Rip Van Winkle / Gilligan's Island private war.

The other news item I remember was the scientists were looking for a very heavy element, one they thought was stable (unlike all those bizarre elements I'd somehow space out about at the bottom right of the periodic table), in medieval Russian stained glass. They thought that the medieval stainers might have found some and used it. I don't think this ever came to anything.

posted by william 12:55 PM
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