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, June 17, 2006

I remember that some people said "Gesundheit" when you sneezed, which we never did. I think I may first have heard "Gesundheit" from the Hoges or the Schubins. This was one of those early introductions to markers for other practices, other familial cultures. Then in sixth grade or so I met kids -- Ronnie Rogers, I think, first -- who told time using "of" rather than "to." Ronnie was one of those kids who had a watch (as well as a Cross pen), and once I asked him the time and he said "a quarter of one." I adopted that formulation, which seemed somehow statelier and more old-fashioned than my father's more dynamic "quarter to," the abbreviation he'd always use since we'd know roughly what time it was, what hour we were near. "Quarter to" had the modern dynamism of Pepsi and the Pontiac he once owned (or maybe once rented). So I guess through sixth grade, anyhow, and probably later, I hadn't yet begun thinking of my parents as retrograde. That may have come with long hair, which for me begun with Ronnie's cooler twin Peter, whose hair was the first boy's that I knew to go beyond a Beatles mop. He was also, I think, the first kid I knew to wear desert boots instead of the Hush Puppies that were as far as the school really wanted kids to go.

posted by william 9:53 AM
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