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, March 05, 2008

I remember biking past 331 Sumner Street in Norwood. It was yellow then, the porch was screened in, and the front of the house was obscured by large evergreen shrubs. So much for the pathetic fallacy: It seemed dark. It seemed shrouded. It didn't want you to look, and if you did look you still couldn't see anything. The air around it was still, thick, heavy. We knew that a Nazi lived there. I remember sometimes feeling that malevolence watched me as I went by the house--and wondered if, just as I knew that a Nazi lived in the house, he knew that Jews were riding bikes outside. I remember that eventually he was arrested, after what seemed like years (how could we all know he was a Nazi and the government fail to notice?), and that the house was sold.

The house is different now--no longer shrouded in shrubs, the front porch is open to the road, the screens removed; it's been painted blue with white trim and seems to breathe differently, or perhaps I breathe differently when I drive past.

posted by Rosasharn 10:56 AM
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