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

Thursday, January 28, 2010

I remember my mother telling me about Animal Crackers. I think we'd read about them in a story, and then she told me they were real! Somewhere in the world the thing this fiction mentioned really existed. More than the Museum in Danny and the Dinosaur since that museum wasn't the real Museum of Natural History. And then: she said I could have some. And that turned out not to mean... some day. It meant the very next day: she brought a box home. Of course they weren't as amazing as the Animal Crackers in the story, which were really beautifully illustrated, and numerous, and seemed three-dimensional, because they were in a picture, and maybe even they came to life (though I don't think so: I think it was only that I assumed they were 3D). But they were still pretty amazing, and I was happy.

posted by William 6:54 PM
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