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

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

I remember how many things that I first saw in cartoons turned out to be real. Mice in the house, for example. A lot of them seemed like cartoon inventions. In particular snow-shoes. The large, netted platforms seemed delightfully ridiculous. I remember seeing them in some Warner Brothers cartoon -- I think Daffy Duck. Then the one time I went hunting (failing to hit anything), the cabin we stayed in overnight had snowshoes hanging on the wall. I was really surprised they existed. What else would turn out to be true?

posted by william 1:06 PM
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