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, October 18, 2010

I remember one lovely pleasure of running cross-country: the way school opened out to space and solitude. We'd start running and as a mid-level runner I'd be more or less alone after a couple of miles, a few hundred yards behind the leaders, a few hundred yards ahead of the stragglers, running up and down hills and through the woods. So it was as though the more or less broad social splotch of school was suddenly pulled into a very long corridor of space, sunny and crisply cold and free. I knew I'd end up back where we'd started, at school or the buses, but in the meantime there was just a lot of ground I didn't know but that was where I should be, space that I was the only person passing through, landscapes that had nothing to do with school or anything interior or any concerted effort or task or assignment. Yes, we were supposed to run, but what cross-country is about is running through spaces not designed for cross-country, unlike soccer fields or basketball courts. I was on a school team, but not at school, I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, but not at home, I was with my friends but not with them since they were elsewhere, ahead or behind. Where I was, nothing was making any demand of me; nothing was interested in me. I think this may have been the first experience, and maybe the last, where I could just look around.

posted by William 7:10 PM
. . . 1 comments
Comments:
A lovely pleasure to read. Thank you.

# posted by Rosasharn : 9:39 PM

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