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


Wednesday, February 01, 2012
I remember the following middle-school social-world discoveries: If I don't trust you, you certainly can't trust me. That was step one. Step two was recognizing that if I know you trust me, I can trust you. Step three was determining that if I were to go ahead and trust you, you could trust me, and if you did, my trust in you would be justified. It wasn't as simple as that, but thinking it through that way gave me courage.


posted by Rosasharn 4:21 PM
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