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, May 19, 2010

I remember being very surprised and impressed that my father could navigate his way through unfamiliar (to me) cities like Chennai without needing directions.

I remember that when people called from the US, we would get in a flurry to finish the conversation quickly so they didn't run up a huge bill -- although, at least by the time I was growing up, they didn't seem a bit concerned about the ticking minutes.

I remember foreign mail being sent and received on onionskin paper. It was hard to find onionskin (and it was perhaps also expensive -- but wouldn't that defy the point?). My mother kept a pad of it in her closet, safe and separate from other stationery.

I remember the inland letter card -- flat-rate paper that folded into an envelope. I liked its efficient design -- how it avoided wasting paper on an envelope, how neatly the tabs closed to seal it, and the preprinted stamp and fields for the address. The only people I knew who used them were my great-grandmother and servants. I remember my mother writing a dictated letter for our servant, and sealing the tabs with rice to avoid the messiness of glue.

posted by sravana 8:45 PM
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