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

Sunday, May 17, 2009

I remember how much I loved Dr. Greenberg, the kindly principal of the Hebrew and Sunday Schools at B'nai Jeshrun. So much nicer than the rabbi whose first name I shared and who lived in our building. I thought that as authorities at the same place they'd be equally nice, but they weren't. Dr. Greenberg led the junior congregation. I remember being one of the Torah attendants a couple of times, while some of the older people read the Torah. I loved Dr. Greenberg's blessing at the end of the service: "May he cause his countenance to shine upon you and to give you peace." I remember his saying that the lamp above the podium was perpetually lit, which was very impressive to me: I thought about the building in ruins in some future century but people desperately keeping the lamp lit over the rubble anyhow.

Sundays we would sing songs -- I loved

By the Sea of Kinnereth,
Ancient legend declareth,
Stands a palace enchanted,
With woods divinely planted.

Who dwells there? It is only
A lad like a nightingale lonely,
Who with prophets and sages
Studies the Torah's pages.

I was somewhat puzzled about how lonely he could be when attended to in his studies by a retinue of prophets and sages, but on the other hand it seemed right: a young boy, lonely and alone, as he is intensively educated by servant-masters. The song was perfectly calculated for a chid's misunderstanding.

We also did film-strips of Torah stories. He would narrate a picture, and then rap twice with his ring on the metal hand rail to the stage when it was time for the next photo (later I played one of "The Sons" in the Tradition song of Fiddler on the Roof on that stage), In high school, when we did the first two books of Paradise Lost I was regarded as expert on the Bible because I knew those stories so well.

I saw him a few years later -- maybe three or four -- and he had a terrible limp and was wizened and old. This was very puzzling to me, because he already seemed to me to be old -- permanently old and wise and in command of his place in the world -- when I first met him. How could he get older? I think he might have been my first intimation that old people aren't immortal, haven't achieved the eternal stability of their vast accumulation of time. Old people get older and then they die.

I didn't quite know that before. Unlike any of the other old people in my life -- people who were old when I first came to know them, and not much older when I was a teenager -- he was getting older faster than I was. This left me sad and -- as though I were accelerating my own aging into heart-hardened experience to match the speed of his own senescence -- cruelly indifferent.

posted by William 9:08 AM
. . . 1 comments
Comments:
I remember singing this song in Sunday School; I loved it too.

# posted by Anonymous : 1:32 PM

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