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

Friday, October 20, 2006

I remember that on the first plane trip I took, when I was eight and we crossed the Atlantic, I noticed a fly on the back of one of the seats as we were getting off of the plane. I thought of it flying at six-hundred miles an hour in the plane, as though I were a seasoned denizen of what for the fly would be a science fiction world. And I thought about how strange it would be for it to be four thousand miles away, an awe-inspiring distance for the fly -- and yet here it was, across the world, on a different continent, still buzzing around. And here it is, being remembered decades later, in a different millennium, that particular fly.

posted by william 8:25 AM
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