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, December 04, 2005

I remember the pleasure of warming my hands at the tensor lamp. I would come home from the cold outside, and it would already have been dark a while, or at least it felt as though my room had been dark for a long time. In the winter I wouldn't see it in the light after school and the park, but only come home to its darkness, as though the cold were inside my room as well. But I'd turn on the desk lamp, and feel a kind of safety within my room itself in its cone of light. The light would illuminate my hand, first one, then the other, and I liked the feel of time having stopped as I held my hand under the light, and felt the warmth of the light itself in the chill air of my room. Time meant something like the oscillating rhythm of the warming and cooling of the ambience, the radiators steaming and changing the atmosphere. But my room was just chilly, and yet my hand was warming in the constancy of the light, and I loved the sense of light radiating implacably outward from the lamp, with no sense of modulation, therefore of time at all.

posted by william 12:56 PM
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