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

Thursday, April 06, 2006

I remember, too, the walk around the walls of Dubrovnik. For some reason my mother didn't come. I think we were staying in Opatija then, in the Hotel Argentina? It was all so vaguely international! I don't know whether my sister came, but she wouldn't have been older than 5. But we walked around with that other father and his son (with the blisters), and I loved walking on the ramparts, and was excited as it became more and more obvious that the walls would go all the way around! I was afraid that this would be another disappointing reality. So I was old enough to know that realities disappointed. (But I couldn't have been older than ten.) Because of this I wasn't that saddened by the fact that we had to climb the stairs to the ground to cross the streets that broke the walls, before climbing up again. We couldn't do it all on the ramparts. But by then 98% for me was easily good enough.

posted by william 9:23 PM
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