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

Friday, January 20, 2006

I remember thinking 'touch wood' meant character (or personality). I think the first few times I heard it, it happened to be my mother talking about someone -- 'Touch wood, she seems all right.' She didn't touch wood while saying it, and I had no idea about the superstition either. Lacking the background knowledge, I must have taken the new phrase as a word standing for the supposed qualifier. Somewhat opposite was the way I interpreted 'all said and done' -- a phrase both my parents used a lot. Since it never seemed to add any content to the sentence, I didn't bother to think about its meaning. Like touchwood, it became a single word (although I must have parsed and understood what it meant).

posted by sravana 12:44 PM
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