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

Thursday, August 30, 2007

I remember how sad the beach at Bellagio looked after a rainy night or morning, even when the day was sunny. I would imagine, because the sun was now out, that people would come down with their kids to sit by the lake, or at least that the kids would come down! -- and we could all have fun. But the sand would still be wet and clumpy and somehow full of pebbles, often with sea-weed (lake-weed?) strewn around, and it just seemed a mistake for the beach to look rainy and unpleasant when the weather was good. I felt that the mistake was being made by the people who accepted the evidence of the beach over the evidence of the sky. But there it was: the lonely beach, and when the little bar beside the cabanas didn't open, and when the very old lady who you rented keys to them from didn't show, it felt as though even the hotel was giving in to the mistake. Often we'd go somewhere on some expedition, and when we returned in the afternoon the beach would be bright and full again. But the sense of days shortening -- the number of days we'd still be there, the night falling earlier and the mornings taking longer to warm up -- was accentuated in the aftermath of the rain, and now the sunny, summery afternoons we returned to seemed much more precarious and ephemeral than they had a week earlier, as August flitted away.

posted by william 7:18 AM
. . . 0 comments

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

I remember the pleasure of keys in hotels -- of the big keys that were kept downstairs behind the reception desk in the box corresponding to your room. Our boxes were on the top right. I liked asking for the key, and I liked depositing it. I liked how big the key was -- too big to carry around with you, but the right size to fill the box and to makes its presence there obvious. I liked being able to tell, if I went to get the key to go upstairs at midday, whether our room was empty or whether my sister might be there, and whether one of my parents might be in their adjoining room. I liked the fact that with the key in the box, you couldn't tell immediately whether there was mail there. Since I liked mail so much, and since it came so infrequently, the large key deferred disappointment for a moment, even as its own benevolent presence made up for it in advance.

posted by william 10:51 PM
. . . 0 comments

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