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

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

I remember that I used to hate the way the white-on-green banner of letters and numerals above the blackboard in our class showed the numeral 3, sort of like this -- Ʒ -- with its top loop replaced by an acute angle. It seemed unlovely, the beautiful symmetry and smoothness of the two parts of the numeral broken, the top turned into a sort of flattened shard which made the number itself seem unfamiliar, unfriendly, out of affinitity with the capital E it mirrored and balanced (especially the way I wrote the E myself). It was as though the bottom left sharp angle of the 2 had been wrenched out of place, or as though the sharpness of the numeral 2 had invaded the familiar friendliness of the 3.

posted by william 4:48 PM
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