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 10, 2006
I remember thinking of time in increments of one and two. So, an estimate of a period longer than two days but shorter than a week was '(the day after)(the day after)+ tomorrow', and so on. I think I did know how to count, but hadn't formalized the idea of addition. Also, the Telugu words for 'the day before yesterday' and 'the other day' are the same, and perhaps I generalized this as a conceptual rule.


posted by sravana 4:31 AM
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