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

Sunday, October 03, 2010

I remember that one evening, my father brought a pack of cigarettes home and lit one. It scared me, not because I knew or cared about what was wrong with smoking, but because it was in my mind a forbidden action. A parent doing something that they had (abstractly) instilled in me was wrong was contradictory and confusing, and I guess also signified their fallibility, and the idea that I'd sometimes have to tell them what to do rather than the other way around. I was also disturbed that my father was amused at my yelling at him to stop -- wasn't it serious enough, then?

posted by sravana 10:39 PM
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