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

Monday, October 09, 2006

I remember another episode of pure and amazing fun. (I think this was at the Dollards' house, or maybe a friend of theirs, somewhere in upstate New York. This was when I thought "the country" and "upstate" were synonymous, so it might not have been there. The house had a cat in it, I remember.) With some kids I sort of knew, but not well, and some friends of theirs, we went running through a large field of grain. It was amazing and wonderful to get lost in this grain forest (sort of like Carey Grant hiding from the plane). We played hide and seek and chased each other -- I think the cat might have joined us. We could hide completely and sneak around and run and trample the grain too. It turned out we were out there for what must have been several hours; it got dark which seemed part of the whole experience of manic secrecy, of delightful and slendidly unexpected ways of hiding. Eventually the grown-ups came looking for us. I think they were a little upset, but not nearly as angry as we might have expected when they did find us. I think our good humor was contagious. I seem to remember that after supper -- hot dogs and soda and potato chips and desert! -- the other kids got to go out again. But my eyes were completely swollen. I sat on an overstuffed armchair, itching and half-blind as they examined me -- it turned out I was seriously allergic to something. I couldn't believe it. It might have been the cat; no one was sure, but I wasn't allowed back out in the grain, so now the day really was over and night had come. We went home soon after.

I remembered this day years later when we read Catcher in the Rye. I understood Holden's not feeling like one of the kids anymore, not just being allowed to run around in the grain.

posted by william 8:20 AM
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