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

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

I remember my mother telling me the the stories of The Merchant of Venice and Maupassant's The Necklace, while we walking somewhere in the neighborhood. (Why were we walking? My father was the one who took us for leisure walks... I don't think my mother ever did by herself.) I think I had asked her who Shakespeare was, and she was introducing me. I remember thinking that it was perhaps not impossible to avoid shedding a drop of blood or overweighing the flesh -- one could collect what spilt and put it back into the body. (!) So I wasn't as fascinated by the story as my mother was trying to get me to be.

There is a set of late ninteenth/early twentieth century stories that I associate with my grandparents' house, because I read them there, from my mother's books. And Maupassant is in that set, but I'm pretty sure that I read him only in Bangalore, and a lot later than the other stories.

posted by sravana 3:30 AM
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