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 20, 2006

I remember when my sisters & I were teenagers, my older sister and I thought our younger sister, B, quite conventional. (Unlike ourselves; we had thoroughly conformed to the "stoner" culture of high school and were therefore rebellious.) We were in on something she was not.

As an adult, these distinctions did not hold. B turned out to have the quickest wit of all three of us, especially in conversation. When B and our mother came to visit my older sister and me in Seattle, we were riding a city bus one day, and we passed a store that specialized in caviar. "It sells only caviar!" my mother said, ready to be awed by the big city. "Oh, no, I'm sure they sell other things," B demurred. "Toast points, for example."

posted by Carceraglio 8:31 PM
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