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, March 18, 2006

I remember New Lincoln, the school that a lot of kids went to who didn't go to Franklin or Trinity after fifth grade. I never saw it, though. But after fifth grade we went from a single poplulation of kids who didn't know that there were different schools you could end up at turned, surprisingly, into IS-44 kids or Art and Design or New Lincoln or Franklin or Trinity kids.

Actually, now that I think of it, Trinity may have been an alternative to P.S. 166 from the start, since I think Tommy went there from first grade on. So it might be that we went from two schools (Hebrew school, my abortive time at L'Ecole Française being outliers) to many different futures, in the summer's transition from one grade to another. After that it was mainly the playground and park that stitched us together as a single population, and that didn't last long.

posted by william 2:30 PM
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