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

Tuesday, July 07, 2009

I remember visiting my great grandmother Babette, my mother's father's mother, in Jacksonville. I remember she lived in a complex of apartments (I remember the flowering trees on the grounds), and that as she got older her apartment shrunk, till she was in a two-room suite. Most important, she had a candy dish and she meant for us to take candies when we went to see her. I always chose the strawberry ones, in the strawberry wrapper, hard candies that had gel inside. I remember when I was about six she gave me a pin: a small gold chick emerging from a silver egg. My mother pinned it to the lapel of my furry purple winter coat. That was the last year we went down to Florida for my father's winter break, before he left academia.

posted by Rosasharn 10:57 PM
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