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

Sunday, February 07, 2010

I remember that my father came home from a business trip with a gift memento: a Superbowl III ticket encased in lucite to make a paperweight. He gave it to me. I really liked it. I was interested in the fact that this was a ticket that once had had immense value and now was just a paperweight. I'd look through the thick glass at this mysterious, depleted artifact a lot.

posted by William 10:04 PM
. . . 2 comments
Comments:
And how old must the paperweight be before it is worth as much, adjusted for inflation, as the ticket was originally?

# posted by Aaron D. Ball : 8:06 AM

Yeah. Alas, I lost it when I went off to college. Like so much else. The comics I collected. I talked to Hugh C a couple of years ago: he's still living on the comics he collected (but he was a much more informed connoisseur than I was) from fourth through tenth grades.

# posted by William : 8:38 AM

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