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

Saturday, July 10, 2010

I remember going into the amazing courtyard of the Belnord once, in a car I think. As I recall, the mother of a friend who lived there had a bunch of stuff to bring home, so we drove in together, and it was beautiful, like another world, an English house drive in the middle of a building in New York. The Belnord was and is a pre-war building with a beautiful facade, and for me that made it pretty typical. But inside it was something else again -- like going into a movie. I didn't live there, and never would, but it was part of New York, and so I did live there, in the city with buildings like this wherever you turned, breathtaking but permanent and no big deal.

posted by William 12:48 PM
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