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

Monday, January 18, 2010

I remember that when Boeing introduced the 747 there were TV commercials showing glamorous people with drinks standing around a grand piano while behind them a spiral staircase led to an upper deck where they could look out of the window, like in a nineteen thirties movie nightclub. A year or two later we got to fly in one! It was just a lot of seats with nothing interesting about the plane except its size. (Once I got to sit in the upper deck, which was like sitting in the upper deck of an observation car but with normal porthole windows and nothing else interesting about it.)

posted by William 5:48 PM
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