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 my father telling me it was 1,100 miles to fly from New York to Chicago. I had a map of the United States on my wall, scaled at 1 inch to a hundred miles. I could measure out about eleven thumb-lengths, which was a nice and consistently repeatable reassurance that I could use the rule of my thumb to measure things, e.g. in my geometry and science and geography classes. I think I last took Geography in fifth grade, so maybe I thought both joints of my thumb came to an inch then? Or that I was big now, in my last year at elementary school, and the top joint was already the inch it was supposed to be? But it turns out that it's substantially less than 1,100 miles from New York to Chicago, so I thought my thumb was longer than it was.

Still my father's statistics were generally right, though in need of tweaking. I remember him telling me that the earth was rotating at about a thousand miles an hour. But this is true at the equator, not in New York. I remember the facts that my paternal grandparents told me that were true: that it takes nine minutes for light to reach us from the sun (some of my school mates said it was seven minutes); that the circumference of the earth was 25,000 miles; that its diameter was 8,000 miles; that I-80 went from New York all the way to San Francisco, and that that the highway was 3,000 miles long. I realize now that the interstates must have been an amazing thing for them.

I remember also being amazed when I first learned that the sum of angles in any triangle came to 180 degrees. I think I read this in a novel, way before we did geometry. I told my uptown (paternal) grandfather this with great excitement. He was surprised that I was excited, since he knew this fact so deeply that it was as self-evident to him as that water was transparent. It seemed amazing to me that someone could just know this about triangles, as though it wasn't something that he'd once learned as I was learning it.

posted by William 9:39 AM
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