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

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

I remember the first time I read to myself. My mother had been reading Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry* to me, and I lost patience waiting for her to have time free to read, or maybe I lost patience watching the words over her shoulder, waiting for her to finish the word, the line, the page. I took the book and sat in my father's big green chair in the library and read the rest to myself. Crazy freedom, needing no one, to read all alone, so fast, to fly through the words light as my eyes would carry me. I remember finishing the last page and bursting into angry tears: too short, too short! Where was the rest of the story? For a long time, my parents would ask me how I liked a book by inquiring whether it was a chapter too short.

*Around the same time, I remember sitting in the bathroom with my mother while she explained that it was important to remember the names of the people who had written the books that you loved. I didn't understand why this was, but I believed her.

posted by Rosasharn 9:47 AM
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