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, December 13, 2008

I remember that one of the things that I loved about the house in Stormville when we decided to rent it was that it had an upstairs! It wasn't like our apartment -- it was like a real house, the kind they had on TV or the movies. I remember that my mother told me that you could slide down the banister. First I'd heard about this -- a recreation I'd never dreamt of, and total fun. She showed me how, straddling the banister, which was all I knew about sliding down them till much later when Tad W showed me the terrifying break-neck speeds you could achieve by sliding down side-saddle. But kids who grew up in New York knew very little about banisters.

posted by william 10:52 AM
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