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

Monday, July 07, 2008

I remember wistfully watching planes flying high overhead. I thought they were going to Europe, going to a new life. They were so high that they had to be going far away, and if they were going far away they were going for a long time. So height meant distance meant permanence. I was jealous. I never considered what a long time might be, but if I'd been asked I think I would have imagined six or eight weeks: summer vacation. Back then six or eight weeks elsewhere meant a new life, meant not having to think about coming back, meant going off to become a different person. There they were, glinting and free, the smallest part of the immensity of the sky, flying east into darkness, and an almost immediate new day, as the sun went down in our prosaic west.

posted by william 11:38 PM
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