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

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

I remember that life changed when you could still be in trouble the next morning. I remember mornings when I was still in trouble and how school was a relief, a sort of shelter in time where if I did what I was supposed to be doing the authorities would not be aggrieved with me. This gave me both sustenance and hope at the end of the day - sustenance because of the feeling that I'd done what I was supposed to do even when my parents were so deeply skeptical of my character, and hope that the strongly perceived sense of time spent dutifully's being a lot of time indeed meant that my parents would also have felt that last night's trouble was a world away.

posted by William 4:34 PM
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This post moves me.

# posted by Rosasharn : 11:22 PM

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