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, August 19, 2006

I remember that when my uptown grandfather got a new car, the back seat, on which I always lay full length often on my stomach, had a hole in it near the edge and the seatback. I think, now, it was burned by a cigarette, and this makes me think my grandfather might have gotten a used car. It's the second car of his I remember (and not the Granada I eventually took my driving test in). The weave of the seat seemed older than that in his earlier car, more like the straw seats on the old IND lines (which I've mentioned before) than like the seats on the faster IRT. I thought of tighter weave as more modern, and the dilapidation of the hole seemed to confirm this. I used to stick my finger through it, feeling the sharp nylon edges and the plasticized padding below.

posted by william 12:05 AM
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