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, August 29, 2005

I remember learning about Peter Stuyvesant and New Amsterdam, and Amsterdam itself. For me Amsterdam was the name of the avenue I crossed to get to P.S. 166, wide and different from the more familiar North-South avenues I knew because it was one-way. It was odd to think that a feature so much a part of my daily routine should be related to a city in Europe, one that still existed but also stood for the past. My sister found $20 in the Amsterdam airport, in the men's room where my father took her, but I have no memory of the airport at all.

posted by william 12:19 AM
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