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 05, 2010

I remember confusing Wordsworth and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, partly because my uptown grandmother's telephone exchange was WAdsworth-7. I remember, remembering that, how huge the printing of the two letters at the beginning of the exchange was on the center of the telephone dial, and how small the rest of the letters before you got to the five numbers.

posted by William 7:44 PM
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