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

Monday, September 27, 2010

I remember writing an essay about gender and abandonment in The Grapes of Wrath. It was eleventh grade, while I was living in Israel. The paper was not assigned. The novel was not assigned. I missed my friends, my life in America, myself, so much that year that I read their literature curriculum (except Hamlet--which I was supposed to be reading in Hebrew in school) and wrote the paper because I wanted to. Our friend Alan Rosen, who taught (teaches) English at Bar Ilan, read the essay, and spent a long time discussing it with me. After that, he invited me to attend one of his American Lit classes; I remember loving his discussion of Billy Budd.

posted by Rosasharn 10:29 AM
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