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

Saturday, September 24, 2005

I remember "First one in," when you served for the first time in a tennis game, and then a little later adult friends of my mothers whom I would play with called it F.B.I., "first ball in." I remember when tennis was a glamorous and obscure game to me, played on red clay courts, and then later when it was a game I loved, but no longer glamorous and obscure. When it was still a mystery to me, one of the things I loved about the equipment were the racket presses, things people not only knew how to use, but of which they knew what the use was.

posted by william 11:37 PM
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