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, February 04, 2006

I remember one Sunday evening in Long Island when we were playing softball. It was summer and lovely to go back to the city early Monday mornings, because it meant that this evening could be similar to Saturday, that we didn't have to pack up and go right away, but that it was more precious than Saturday because the end of the day meant the end of the weekend anyhow.

As we were playing the fire-siren went off, and one of the fathers, who'd been pitching, ran hell-for-leather from the mound to his car. His kids kind of followed him, and the game broke up, so we got into -- whose car? -- and started driving home. We saw the pitcher get out of his car at the volunteer fire-station, which was on the way, and hop onto an engine which went racing ahead of us up Montauk highway. It turned into my street! It turned into my driveway! My family was standing outside the house with a firetruck there and a bunch of firefighters in raincoats investigating. It turned out there was some propane leak, and that the exposed copper wire under the house could have exploded the whole thing. No hot water that night, and getting to the city the next morning was a relief.

posted by william 2:35 AM
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