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, November 22, 2006

I remember that when Mrs. Eben came on the intercom to tell us that the President had been shot, the light were already out in the classroom. It was almost 3, and I was coloring my Thanksgiving feather in the dim natural light. We were sitting in our coats in rows at the tables in the part of the room facing the classroom door. The other part of the room had the blackboard, and I remember this part as a kind of holding or transitional area. And so I suppose it proved to be, that day when I was just 7.

posted by william 8:35 PM
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