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, July 01, 2009

I remember how pretty frequently there'd be workers on the track at the 96th street subway station where I waited for the train to school. They would wear yellow slickers, like rain jackets. I loved watching the calm way they'd step between the pillars that separated the tracks when a train -- or sometimes two -- came into the station, and wait in that narrow space of safety, to reappear when the train pulled away. I'd sometimes get to the station, or get home from school, just in time to see them going up or down the tiny ladder at the end of the platform, almost inconspicuous but always a kind of option in space that I liked knowing and thinking about since no one else paid any attention to it. Except the workers who belonged to the subway and to its history and procedures in a way that was part of the solidity of the city -- the city I lived in and whose subways I now rode, just like my parents.

posted by William 7:07 PM
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