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, December 15, 2009

I remember that business failures weren't like other failures -- driving accidents, alcohol, divorce -- that made you realize that adults could sometimes be weak and imperfect. Everyone seemed to suffer financial losses at some point, without visibly having done anything foolish. I remember my father telling someone how much he had lost in the stock market one year -- to my mind, a terrific amount. But my father was wise and cautious -- if he suffered a loss, it wasn't indicative of his own failure, but of the harshness of the world in which this loss was so easy and unavoidable. And the fact that adults constantly participated in this world, but seemed unfazed at the end of the day, made their wisdom and courage all the more impressive.

posted by sravana 5:02 AM
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