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, January 03, 2007

I remember when I was cutting Hebrew School I was also cutting my practice sessions with Dr. Greenberg for my Bar Mitzvah. One day I bit the bullet and went to Miss Russler's class.

I liked her; people said she was scary, but she turned out to be less scary than I'd been anticipating; I remember her rebuking the Earl of Snowdon in some Simchas Torah sermon she gave, or talk, or exhortation, in the main synagogue at Bnai Jeshrun, for suggesting that Jews were genetically superior; it was surprising and interesting not to want to claim superiority, just because all of us wanted to believe we were really from Krypton.

She was imperturbable. But halfway through the class Dr. Greenberg came in. How could I be scared of him? He was so gentle and wonderful. But I was terrified. He opened the door, apologized, and told Miss Russler that he had to "borrow a third of her class." Of course there were three of us there. I desperately clung to the hope that the odds were on my side. But they weren't. Away he took me.

Nothing traumatic happened, as I remember, except that he changed his tune -- literally -- on my Torah portion. He'd sung it into a tape-recorder for me to memorize, and I had started doing so. But now when I sung it as he had a month or two earlier, he was irritated and corrected me. I think this may be the only time I ever saw him irritated. It was too bad that it was a case where he was wrong. But of course I realized I was more wrong, and maybe it was good for me not to cash in the points I might have thought his unjust irritation entitled me to. Appropriately enough, with my Bar Mitzvah coming up.

posted by william 6:42 PM
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