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

Friday, July 14, 2006

I remember my mother telling me about ambrosia and nectar -- food and drink for the gods! I was surprised, a few years later (when I was eight or nine) to find that you could buy peach and apricot nectar in cans, and then that bees sipped nectar. Ambrosia has come to mean for me the noun from which a mild adjective of overpraise derives; and nectar next to nothing; but sometimes the word can remind me of the thrill it first had for me when my mother told me about it.

posted by william 10:05 AM
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