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

Saturday, November 04, 2006

I remember that one day my parents and some friends of theirs (with kids) decided to take the Circle Line around Manhattan. It went up to West Point, which I thought was hours away (since it was "upstate.") We didn't really see much there, though -- nothing I remember. Maybe the Tappan Zee bridge, but I'm not so sure. As we came around and back to where we had started, we could see that my mother had a sunburn. We checked ourselves too; I had a minor one. I was more interested in how it felt than in the pain, which was minimal. The peeling was fascinating too. I think my mother's bothered her more than mine did. It was certainly more dramatic.

posted by william 2:36 PM
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