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, March 24, 2006

I remember another word like shirk that I found puzzling as a child: shy. They told me I was shy, which I knew wasn't a good thing to be. But they weren't rebuking me either. They were describing something about me that they knew was making life disconcerting to me, that impaired possibilities for me. So their tone was both regretful and merely descriptive. It was ok that I was shy, but for me not quite ok that it was ok.

posted by william 8:25 AM
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