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, April 09, 2011

I remember my uptown grandmother telling me to shake the sand out of my shoes when we'd been to the sandbox. I didn't know I had sand in my shoes! She did though, and I saw that she was right as she tilted my shoes over the toilet. The whole thing was really neat.

posted by William 9:32 AM
. . . 1 comments
Comments:
This memory reminds me of the mysterious appearance of sand in my bathing suit. Always a surprise, always incomprehensible: How did sand get there? That was inside, and sand was outside. It just didn't make sense.

# posted by Rosasharn : 9:41 PM

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