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, October 09, 2005

I remember that the exciting thing about Diplomacy was the promise it made of pure childish delight in a game with discursive intellectual seriousness. It was the first real game I played where one played at being an adult. Not only an adult, but the kind adult that the news was about -- the political news, not the sports pages. All those ten minute moves of conferring and strategizing, just to move a ship somewhere. And of course we never, ever finished a game -- has anyone? -- which was appropriate too, since it turns out that life is the discovery that all paths towards what you thought adulthood might be are closed. But perhaps one day I will finish a game, and then I really will be an adult.

posted by william 9:38 AM
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