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, November 29, 2010
I remember the chocolate-covered cookies at Nilgiri's. They were sold individually, wrapped in red or green foil. It seemed decadent to have both chocolate and biscuit in the same item... decadent more in a gluttonous way than an indulgent one. I remember that some girls who had family members in the Middle East would sometimes bring Kit-Kats and Mars Bars to school, which would have partly melted and become a gooey mess with the heat by mid-day.


posted by sravana 12:05 AM
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