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, August 31, 2006

I remember how stately the curtains at my uptown grandparents' house were, especially in the dining room. They were gauze, and fairly sheer, but somehow substantial anyhow. They never moved, except perhaps with a kind of unhurried, transcendent competence to the motion of the breeze that came through there. Their motion emphasized the stillness of the room they were in -- no one rushing through, not much happening, daylight and shadows in the unlit room. They were part of the furnishing of the room, dark like it, and light like the daylight in the window. It felt safe there, as though time weren't passing, as though my grandparents' old age were a permanent state, what they'd settled into for good now, and what I could rely on.

posted by william 10:32 PM
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