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, November 05, 2011

I remember going to the racetrack early in the mornings with my father, to watch the training. My father had no particular connection with horses or gambling. I wasn't that interested in horses myself (not yet).

It impressed me that my father knew this was a thing one could do, and that he knew we could eat breakfast in the commissary with the trainers and jockeys. (Though maybe jockeys rode only during races; I wouldn't have been able to pick them out by their size, since they were all grown-ups.) The breakfast was much more interesting to me than the racetrack. People knew each other, and they knew that they did not know us, and my father had known that they wouldn't mind.

We may have done this only once. It seemed like something we had always done and always would do.

posted by Carceraglio 8:35 PM
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