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

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

I remember when I first was (made) aware that one should be sensitive to one's audience when speaking or telling a joke (I suppose I'd kind of known this for a while, but not known what I'd known exactly, or moreover what I didn't): I was thirteen, traveling in my grandparents' car with my favorite cousin, Jeanette, and I read aloud what I thought was a really funny line from Wilde: "To lose both [parents] looks like carelessness." Then Jeanette turned around and said, "I've lost both parents. So have your grandparents." I was mortified at how insensitive I'd been, at how I hadn't thought at that moment about the histories of the people I was talking to.

posted by jennylewin 1:33 PM
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