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

Friday, December 25, 2009

I remember the few times I celebrated Christmas as a child -- I mean enjoyed the luxuries and indulgences of Christmas. Once with the Herings (when we put up our socks and found huge stockings the next morning; I had no idea about any of this, and didn't know why my parents wanted me to tape my sock to the mantelpiece); and another time at Michael C.'s, when there was just the slightest dusting of snow and I realized that late December usually wasn't snowy yet, and also somehow what the song and the term meant, which I'd never thought about before. I believe I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull that weekend, since Michael's father had a brand new copy of it and he was very up-to-date on the books with buzz.

I think there may have been one other Christmas weekend: the weekend I'm thinking of is one where I poked a fire in a fireplace for the first time, which made me feel both little and an adult (I knew I wasn't an adult because I was doing this for the first time, and that made me feel smaller).

posted by William 10:16 PM
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