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, March 26, 2006

I remember that in our old apartment we always called "Who is it?" whenever anyone rang. When I was 8 and we moved to 7F, one of the features of the new apartment that I liked immediately was the peephole. My downtown grandmother had one too, but hers was one of those extreme wide-angle ones that I couldn't figure out how to see through accurately at the time. Neither could she. She'd look through when I rang, and then call "Who is it?" My uptown grandmother didn't have a peephole, so she also always called "Who is it?" but we had to do that less and less in 7F, and this combined with the fact that when one of our grandmothers was taking care of my sister and me she would always call when the bell rang made our use of the peephole into another one of the more modern traditions that distinguished our American youthfulness and competence from their old-world ways and traditions.

posted by william 8:19 AM
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