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, April 14, 2007

I remember how interesting the word apparently is. One of those adult adverbs, like incidentally, that brought a more subtle judgment to bear on the assertion it qualified than I was capable of at the time. It meant that something looked a certain way, but that the person using the word wasn't convinced. I think my father used it more than my mother, but as soon as I say that I think my mother used it more than my father. I associate it with their conversations about work at our dining room table -- where I also heard the word affidavit a lot (a word whose meaning was much less clear to me).

posted by william 11:13 AM
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