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

Monday, December 04, 2006

I remember the pleasure of scraping the yellow paint off the sides of a pencil and revealing the pure, strangely good wood beneath. It was hard to get all the paint off, but easy to get a lot of it off.

I remember the feel of a chewed pencil, the roughness of the toothmarks, and also the pleasure of chewing. You went too far if you got to the crunch of lead or graphite.

I remember later the fun of placing pencils parallel to the incline on our inclined desks and trying to get them to roll down their hexagonal sides. You'd have to bounce the desk or blow -- a good way to pass the time in boring classes.

I remember once getting into trouble because I kept dropping my pen. This was accidental, but I now realize the teacher thought I was doing it on purpose. At the time I thought I was in trouble just for being clumsy.

posted by william 10:12 PM
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